Related papers: Image Quality Specification for Solar Telescopes
The search for Earth-like exoplanets requires high-contrast and high-angular resolution instruments, which designs can be very complex: they need an adaptive optics system to compensate for the effect of the atmospheric turbulence on image…
Adaptive Optics at mid-IR wavelengths has long been seen as either not necessary or easy. The impact of atmospheric turbulence on the performance of 8-10 meter class telescopes in the mid-IR is relatively small compared to other performance…
The Galactic center offers us a unique opportunity to test General Relativity (GR) with the orbits of stars around a supermassive black hole. Observations of these stars have been one of the great successes of adaptive optics on 8-10 m…
Context. The contribution of quiet-Sun regions to the solar irradiance variability is currently unclear. Some solar-cycle variations of the quiet-Sun physical structure, such as the temperature gradient, might affect the irradiance. The…
The discovery of the exoplanet Proxima b highlights the potential for the coming generation of giant segmented mirror telescopes (GSMTs) to characterize terrestrial --- potentially habitable --- planets orbiting nearby stars with direct…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-kpc scales. It can be used to test the existence of completely dark subhalos surrounding galaxies, as predicted by the standard cold dark matter model, or…
High angular resolution images obtained with a hypertelescope can strongly constrain the radiative-hydrodynamics simulations of red supergiant (RSG) stars, in terms of intensity contrast, granulation size and temporal variations of the…
Spectropolarimetric observations used to infer the solar magnetic fields are obtained with a limited spatial resolution. The effects of this limited resolution on the inference of the open flux over the observed region have not been…
We present a detailed discussion of how to obtain precise stellar photometry in crowded fields using images from multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems, with the intent of informing the scientific development of this key technology…
Broad-band imaging and even imaging with a moderate bandpass (about 1 nm) provides a "photon-rich" environment, where frame selection ("lucky imaging") becomes a helpful tool in image restoration allowing us to perform a cost-benefit…
A parametric model of granulation employing a small number of parameters was developed. Synthetic spectra calculated using this model closely match observed spectra and, in particular, reproduce the asymmetries observed in spectral lines.…
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
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…
This paper discusses some of the challenges of spectro-polarimetric observations with a large aperture solar telescope such as the ATST or the EST. The observer needs to reach a compromise among spatial and spectral resolution, time…
Correlations between tracers of the matter density field and gravitational lensing are sensitive to the evolution of the matter power spectrum and the expansion rate across cosmic time. Appropriately defined ratios of such correlation…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
We demonstrate for the first time an efficient, photonic-based astronomical spectrograph on the 8-m Subaru Telescope. An extreme adaptive optics system is combined with pupil apodiziation optics to efficiently inject light directly into a…
Rather than using an adaptive optics (AO) system to correct a telescope s entire pupil, it can instead be used to more finely correct a smaller sub-aperture. Indeed, existing AO systems can be used to correct a sub-aperture 1/3 to 1/2 the…
Direct imaging and spectral characterization of exoplanets using extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes and space observatories. However, quasi-static wavefront errors will limit the…
Adaptive optics (AO) have been used to correct wavefronts to achieve diffraction limited point spread functions in a broad range of optical applications, prominently ground-based astronomical telescopes operating in near infra-red. While…