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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) contains the only currently operating coronagraph in space that is not trained on the Sun. In an era of extreme--adaptive-optics--fed coronagraphs, and with the…
A main source of bias in transmission spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres is magnetic activity of the host star in the form of stellar spots, faculae or flares. However, the fact that main-sequence stars have a chromosphere and a corona,…
The WFIRST-AFTA 2.4 m telescope will provide in the next decade the opportunity to host a coronagraph for the imaging and spectroscopy of planets and disks. The telescope, however, is not ideal, given its obscured aperture. Only recently…
Near-future astronomical survey experiments, such as LSST, possess system requirements of unprecedented fidelity that span photometry, astrometry and shape transfer. Some of these requirements flow directly to the array of science imaging…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is crucial for advancing our understanding of planetary systems beyond our solar system, but it faces significant challenges due to the high contrast between host stars and their planets. Wavefront aberrations…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…
Images from adaptive optics systems are generally affected by significant distortions of the point spread function (PSF) across the field of view, depending on the position of natural and artificial guide stars. Image reduction techniques…
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument will be the first large scale coronagraphmission with active wavefront control to be operated in space and will demonstrate technologies essential tofuture missions to image…
Accurate knowledge of the telescope's point spread function (PSF) is essential for the weak gravitational lensing measurements that hold great promise for cosmological constraints. For space telescopes, the PSF may vary with time due to…
Combining large segmented space telescopes, coronagraphy and wavefront control methods is a promising solution to produce a dark hole (DH) region in the coronagraphic image of an observed star and study planetary companions. The thermal and…
Several Extreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) systems dedicated to the detection and characterisation of the exoplanets are currently in operation for 8-10 meter class telescopes. Coronagraphs are commonly used in these facilities to reject the…
We present the performance of the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) of SPHERE, the high-contrast imager for the ESO VLT telescope designed to perform imaging and spectroscopy of extrasolar planets, obtained from tests performed at the…
We present the SPICA Coronagraphic Instrument (SCI), which has been designed for a concentrated study of extra-solar planets (exoplanets). SPICA mission provides us with a unique opportunity to make high contrast observations because of its…
The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easily. The FITS standard is, however, showing its age. Developed…
We present a new technique for monitoring microlensing activity even in highly crowded fields, and use this technique to place limits on low-mass MACHOs in the haloes of M31 and the Galaxy. Unlike present Galactic microlensing surveys, we…
The MEDUSAE method (Multispectral Exoplanet Detection Using Simultaneous Aberration Estimation) is dedicated to the detection of exoplanets and disks features in multispectral high-contrast images. The concept of MEDUSAE is to retrieve both…
Any high-contrast imaging instrument in a future large space-based telescope will include an integral field spectrograph (IFS) for measuring broadband starlight residuals and characterizing the exoplanet's atmospheric spectrum. In this…
For diffraction-limited optical systems an accurate physical optics model is necessary to properly evaluate instrument performance. Astronomical observatories outfitted with coronagraphs for direct exoplanet imaging require physical optics…
In a previous paper we described a method of estimating the single-measurement bias to be expected in astrometric observations of targets in crowded fields with the future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). That study was based on a…
High contrast imaging and spectroscopy provide unique constraints for exoplanet formation models as well as for planetary atmosphere models. But this can be challenging because of the planet-to-star small angular separation and high flux…