High Contrast Observations of Bright Stars with a Starshade

Anthony Harness, Webster Cash, Steve Warwick
(Submitted on 4 Dec 2017)

Starshades are a leading technology to enable the direct detection and spectroscopic characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. In an effort to advance starshade technology through system level demonstrations, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope was adapted to enable the suppression of astronomical sources with a starshade. The long baselines achievable with the heliostat provide measurements of starshade performance at a flight-like Fresnel number and resolution, aspects critical to the validation of optical models. The heliostat has provided the opportunity to perform the first astronomical observations with a starshade and has made science accessible in a unique parameter space, high contrast at moderate inner working angles. On-sky images are valuable for developing the experience and tools needed to extract science results from future starshade observations. We report on high contrast observations of nearby stars provided by a starshade. We achieve 5.6e-7 contrast at 30 arcseconds inner working angle on the star Vega and provide new photometric constraints on background stars near Vega.

Comments:    29 pages, 18 figures. Published in Experimental Astronomy, Exp Astron (2017)
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
DOI:    10.1007/s10686-017-9562-1
Cite as:    arXiv:1712.01375 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1712.01375v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Anthony Harness
[v1] Mon, 4 Dec 2017 21:25:35 GMT (1481kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01375