Related papers: Ground-Based Coronagraphy with High Order Adaptive…
High-contrast coronagraphy will be needed to image and characterize faint extra-solar planetary systems. Coronagraphy is a rapidly evolving field, and many enhanced alternatives to the classical Lyot coronagraph have been proposed in the…
Imaging exo-Earths is an exciting but challenging task because of the 10^-10 contrast ratio between these planets and their host star at separations narrower than 100 mas. Large segmented aperture space telescopes enable the sensitivity…
Context. Phase-mask coronagraphy is advantageous in terms of inner working angle and discovery space. It is however still plagued by drawbacks such as sensitivity to tip-tilt errors and chromatism. A nulling stellar coronagraph based on the…
Atmospheric wavefront prediction based on previous wavefront sensor measurements can greatly enhance the performance of adaptive optics systems. We propose an optimal linear approach based on the Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF)…
We present the results of an adaptive optics survey for faint companions among Galactic O-type star systems (V < 8) using the Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) 3.6-meter telescope on Haleakala. We surveyed these O star systems in…
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…
The ability to characterize exoplanets by spectroscopy of their atmospheres requires direct imaging techniques to isolate planet signal from the bright stellar glare. One of the limitations with the direct detection of exoplanets, either…
We present the results of adaptive-optics imaging of 12 (z < 0.6) quasars in the H and K bands using the PUEO system mounted on the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. The QSOs (m_V > 15.0) themselves are used as reference for the correction.…
Stellar coronagraph performance is highly sensitive to optical aberrations. In order to effectively suppress starlight for exoplanet imaging applications, low-order wavefront aberrations entering a coronagraph such as tip-tilt, defocus and…
A multi-object spectrograph on the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope will be required to operate with good sky coverage. Many of the interesting deep cosmological fields were deliberately chosen to be free of bright foreground…
We present a promising approach to the extremely fast sensing and correction of small wavefront errors in adaptive optics systems. As our algorithm's computational complexity is roughly proportional to the number of actuators, it is…
FRAM - F/(Ph)otometric Robotic Atmospheric Monitor is the latest addition to the atmospheric monitoring instruments of the Pierre Auger Observatory. An optical telescope equipped with CCD camera and photometer, it automatically observes a…
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…
Ground-based adaptive optics (AO) in the infrared has made exceptional advances in approaching space-like image quality at higher collecting area. Optical-wavelength applications are now also growing in scope. We therefore provide here a…
We present an in-depth characterization of the polarimetric channel of the Large-Angle Spectrometric COronagraph LASCO-C2 onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO). The polarimetric analysis of the white-light images makes use…
We present early laboratory simulations and extensive on-sky tests validating of the performance of a shaped pupil coronagraph (SPC) behind an extreme-AO corrected beam of the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system. In…
We report on the first observation of cosmologically distant field galaxies with an high order Adaptive Optics (AO) system on an 8-10 meter class telescope. Two galaxies were observed at 1.6 microns at an angular resolution as high as 50…
Directly imaging and characterizing Earth-like exoplanets is a tremendously difficult instrumental challenge. Present coronagraphic systems have yet to achieve the required $10^{-10}$ broadband contrast in a laboratory environment, but…
Since the year 2000, adaptive optics (AO) has seen the emergence of a variety of new concepts addressing particular science needs; multiconjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) is one of them. By correcting the atmospheric turbulence in 3D using…
Predictive wavefront control is an important and rapidly developing field of adaptive optics (AO). Through the prediction of future wavefront effects, the inherent AO system servo-lag caused by the measurement, computation, and application…