Related papers: Theoretical Limits on Extrasolar Terrestrial Plane…
PRAIA - Package for the Reduction of Astronomical Images Automatically - is a suite of photometric and astrometric tasks designed to cope with huge amounts of heterogeneous observations with fast processing, no human intervention, minimum…
Global coronal models seek to produce an accurate physical representation of the Sun's atmosphere which can be used, for example, to drive space weather models. Assessing their accuracy is a complex task and there are multiple observational…
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…
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…
We present observations of \epseri~with the JWST/NIRCam coronagraph aimed at imaging planets orbiting within this system. In particular, these observations targeted (1) the Jupiter-like planet, first detected orbiting at 3.5 AU with radial…
Earth-sized planets around nearby stars are being detected for the first time by ground-based radial velocity and space-based transit surveys. This milestone is opening the path towards the definition of missions able to directly detect the…
We study the fundamental limits of detection for astrophysical observations in the far infrared. Understanding these fundamental limits is critical to the planning and analysis of experiments in this region. We specifically characterize the…
Directly observing exoplanets with coronagraphs is impeded by the presence of speckles from aberrations in the optical path, which can be mitigated in hardware with wavefront control as well as in post-processing. This work explores using…
This report summarizes the current status of efforts to develop the technologies required for coronographic space missions aimed at the detection of terrestrial extrasolar planets.
As adaptive optics technology continues to improve, the stellar coronagraph will play an ever increasing role in ground-based high-contrast imaging observations. Though several different image masks exist for the most common type of…
We present the results of the first laboratory experiment of checkerboard shaped pupil binary mask coronagraphs using visible light, in the context of the R&D activities for future mid-infrared space missions such as the 3.5 m SPICA…
In the context of exoplanet detection, the performance of coronagraphs is limited by wavefront errors. To efficiently correct for these aberrations with a deformable mirror, it is mandatory to measure them using the science detector with a…
High-contrast imaging provided by a coronagraph is critical for the direction imaging of the Earth-like planet orbiting its bright parent star. A major limitation for such direct imaging is the speckle noise that is induced from the…
Extrasolar planets observation and characterization by high contrast imaging instruments is set to be a very important subject in observational astronomy. Dedicated instruments are being developed to achieve this goal with very high…
While radial velocity surveys have demonstrated that the population of gas giants peaks around $3~\text{au}$, the most recent high-contrast imaging surveys have only been sensitive to planets beyond $\sim~10~\text{au}$. Sensitivity at small…
We present an overview of the EXoplanetary Circumstellar Environments and Disk Explorer (EXCEDE), selected by NASA for technology development and maturation. EXCEDE will study the formation, evolution and architectures of exoplanetary…
Direct detection of exoplanets requires high dynamic range imaging. Coronagraphs could be the solution, but their performance in space is limited by wavefront errors (manufacturing errors on optics, temperature variations, etc.), which…
We present design considerations for a ground-based survey for transiting exoplanets around L and T dwarfs, spectral classes that have yet to be thoroughly probed for planets. We simulate photometry for L and T targets with a variety of…
In the recent years, interferometric arrays of optical telescopes have reached sizes of the order of 100m, but they have yet to produce high-resolution images. The analysis of image formation now shows that such images are obtainable…
Properly apodized pupils can deliver point spread functions (PSFs) free of Airy rings, and are suitable for high dynamical range imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets (ETPs). To reach this goal, classical pupil apodization (CPA)…