Laboratory Testing of a Lyot Coronagraph Equipped with an Eighth‐Order Notch Filter Image Mask
| Autor: | Shane Miller, Justin Crepp, Jian Ge, Marc J. Kuchner, Andrew Vanden Heuvel |
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| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: |
Physics
business.industry Astrophysics (astro-ph) FOS: Physical sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Astrophysics Band-stop filter Terrestrial Planet Finder 01 natural sciences Deformable mirror law.invention Tilt (optics) Optics Space and Planetary Science law 0103 physical sciences Monochromatic color 010306 general physics Focus (optics) business 010303 astronomy & astrophysics Throughput (business) Coronagraph |
| Zdroj: | The Astrophysical Journal. 646:1252-1259 |
| ISSN: | 1538-4357 0004-637X |
| DOI: | 10.1086/504977 |
| Popis: | We have built a series of notch filter image masks that make the Lyot coronagraph less susceptible to low-spatial-frequency optical aberrations. In this paper, we present experimental results of their performance in the lab using monochromatic light. Our tests show that these ``eighth-order'' masks are resistant to tilt and focus alignment errors, and can generate contrast levels of 2 x 10^-6 at 3 lambda/D and 6 x 10^-7 at 10 lambda/D without the use of corrective optics such as deformable mirrors. This work supports recent theoretical studies suggesting that eighth-order masks can provide the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph with a large search area, high off-axis throughput, and a practical requisite pointing accuracy. Comment: Accepted to ApJ. 16 pages, 7 figures, Contact jcrepp@astro.ufl.edu for high resolution images |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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