Related papers: A Visible-light Lyot Coronagraph for SCExAO/VAMPIR…
The EXoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer (EXCEDE) science mission concept uses a visible-wavelength Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph to enable high-contrast imaging of circumstellar debris systems…
We present a publicly available software package developed for exploring apodized pupil Lyot coronagraph (APLC) solutions for various telescope architectures. In particular, the package optimizes the apodizer component of the APLC for a…
High-contrast imaging in the next decade aims to image exoplanets at smaller angular separations and deeper contrasts than ever before. A problem that has recently garnered attention for telescopes equipped with high-contrast coronagraphs…
The optical vortex coronagraph (OVC) is one of the promising ways for direct imaging exoplanets because of its small inner working angle and high throughput. This paper presents the design and laboratory demonstration performance at 633nm…
We have designed and built the first band-limited coronagraphic mask used for ground-based high-contrast imaging observations. The mask resides in the focal plane of the near-infrared camera PHARO at the Palomar Hale telescope and receives…
Future high-contrast imaging spectroscopy with a large segmented telescope will be able to detect atmospheric molecules of Earth-like planets around G- or K-type main-sequence stars. Increasing the number of target planets will require a…
The Lyot project used an optimized Lyot coronagraph with Extreme Adaptive Optics at the 3.63m Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope (AEOS) to observe 86 stars from 2004 to 2007. In this paper we give an overview of the survey results…
Less than 3% of the known exoplanets were directly imaged for two main reasons. They are angularly very close to their parent star, which is several magnitudes brighter. Direct imaging of exoplanets thus requires a dedicated instrumentation…
The 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics tasked future space observatories with the goal of detecting and characterizing a large sample of Earth-like exoplanets. To achieve this, these observatories will require coronagraphs…
The last few years have seen a variety of new image mask designs for diffraction-limited coronagraphy. Could there still be useful designs as yet undiscovered? To begin to answer this question, I survey and unify the Fraunhofer theory of…
Described here is the design and commissioning of a coronagraph facility for the 4.2 metre William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and its Nasmyth Adaptive Optics system for Multi-purpose Instrumentation (NAOMI). The use of the NAOMI system gives…
The unparalleled theoretical performance of an ideal vector vortex coronagraph makes it one of the most promising technologies for directly imaging exoplanets with a future, off-axis space telescope. However, the image contrast required for…
A vortex coronagraph is now available for high contrast observations with the Keck/NIRC2 instrument at L band. Reaching the optimal performance of the coronagraph requires fine control of the wavefront incident on the phase mask. In…
We present the design of a portable coronagraph, CATEcor, that incorporates a novel "shaded truss" style of external occultation and serves as a proof-of-concept for that family of coronagraphs. The shaded truss design style has the…
The continual push to directly image exoplanets at lower masses and closer separations orbiting around bright stars remains limited by both quasi-static and residual adaptive optics (AO) aberration. In previous papers we have proposed a…
One of the primary science goals of the Large UV/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) mission concept is to detect and characterize Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby stars with direct imaging. The success of its coronagraph instrument…
We performed an experimental verification of a coronagraph. As a result, we confirmed that, at the focal region where the planetary point spread function exists, the coronagraph system mitigates the raw contrast of a star-planet system by…
We analyze the detection capability of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) for all currently operating coronagraphs in space. We define as CMEs events that propagate beyond 10 solar radii with morphologies broadly consistent with a magnetic flux…
Potentially habitable planets around nearby stars less massive than solar-type stars could join targets of the spectroscopy of the planetary reflected light with future space telescopes. However, the orbits of most of these planets occur…
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…