Related papers: Effects of Mirror Seeing on High-Contrast Adaptive…
Radial velocity instruments require high spectral resolution and extreme thermo-mecanical stability, even more difficult to achieve in near-infra red (NIR) where the spectrograph has to be cooled down. For a seeing-limited spectrograph, the…
Current projects for large telescopes demand a proper knowledge of atmospheric turbulence to design efficient adaptive optics systems in order to reach large Strehl ratios. However, the proper characterization of the turbulence above a…
Image degradation impedes our ability to extract information from astronomical observations. One factor contributing to this degradation is ``dome seeing", the reduction in image quality due to variations in the index of refraction within…
The next generation of adaptive optics (AO) systems will require tomographic reconstruction techniques to map the optical refractive index fluctuations, generated by the atmospheric turbulence, along the line of sight to the astronomical…
One of the scientific goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to measure the evolution of dark energy by measuring subtle distortions of galaxy shapes due to weak gravitational lensing caused by the evolving dark matter…
Context. Adaptive optics (AO) is now a tool commonly deployed in astronomy. The real time correction of the atmospheric turbulence that AO enables allows telescopes to perform close to the diffraction limit at the core of their point spread…
Future gravitational wave detectors (GWDs) such as Advanced LIGO upgrades and the Einstein Telescope are planned to operate at cryogenic temperatures using crystalline silicon (cSi) test-mass mirrors at an operation wavelength of 1550 nm.…
The development of adaptive optics (AO) played a major role in modern astronomy over the last three decades. By compensating for the atmospheric turbulence, these systems enable to reach the diffraction limit on large telescopes. In this…
This paper presents a study of the atmospheric refraction and its effect on the light coupling efficiency in an instrument using single-mode optical fibers. We show the analytical approach which allowed us to assess the need to correct the…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) entered on-sky commissioning phase, and had its First Light at the Gemini South telescope in November 2013. Meanwhile, the fast loops for atmospheric correction of the Extreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) system have…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) combines extreme adaptive optics, an integral field spectrograph, and a high performance coronagraph to directly image extrasolar planets in the near-infrared. Because the coronagraph blocks most of the light…
In long adaptive optics corrected exposures, exoplanet detections are currently limited by speckle noise originating from the telescope and instrument optics, and it is expected that such noise will also limit future high-contrast imaging…
We study theoretically the internal thermal noise of a mirror coated on a plano-convex substrate. The comparison with a cylindrical mirror of the same mass shows that the effect on a light beam can be reduced by a factor 10, improving the…
Sensitivity and resolution of space telescopes are directly related to the size of the primary mirror. Enabling such future extremely large space telescopes or even arrays of those will require to drastically reduce the areal weight of the…
Direct exoplanet spectroscopy aims to measure the spectrum of an exoplanet while simultaneously minimizing the light collected from its host star. Isolating the planet light from the starlight improves the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) per…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
The extreme contrast ratios between stars and their planets at optical wavelengths make it challenging to isolate the light reflected by exoplanet atmospheres. Yet, these reflective properties reveal key processes occurring in the…
Effects of long-term atmospheric change were looked for in photometry employing the Gemini North and South twin Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N and GMOS-S) archival data. The whole GMOS imaging database, beginning from 2003, was compared…
Atmospheric turbulence degrades the quality of astronomical observations in ground-based telescopes, leading to distorted and blurry images. Adaptive Optics (AO) systems are designed to counteract these effects, using atmospheric…
Three-mode parametric instability is a threat to attaining design power levels in Advanced gravitational wave detectors. The first observation of three-mode parametric instability in a long optical cavity revealed that instabilities could…