Significant optical engineering advances at the University of Arizona are being made for
design, fabrication, and construction of next generation astronomical telescopes. This …

This chapter reviews various methods of detecting planetary companions to stars from an
observational perspective, focusing on radial velocities, astrometry, direct imaging, transits …

The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wave front chromaticity, and scintillation on the point-
spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground-based adaptive optics (AO) are …

Many high-contrast coronagraph designs have recently been proposed. In this paper, their
suitability for direct imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets is reviewed. We also develop a …

Great strides have been made in recent years toward the goal of high-contrast imaging with
a sensitivity adequate to detect earth-like planets around nearby stars. It appears that the …

A direct image of an exoplanet system is a snapshot of the planets and disk around a central
star. We can estimate the orbit of a planet from a time series of images, and we can estimate …

In the context of high dynamic range imaging, this study presents a breakthrough for the
understanding of apodized pupil Lyot coronagraphs, making them available for arbitrary …

High-contrast imaging from space must overcome two major noise sources to successfully
detect a terrestrial planet angularly close to its parent star: photon noise from diffracted …

Direct observation of Earth-like planets is extremely challenging, because their parent stars
are about 1010 times brighter but lie just a fraction of an arcsecond away. In space, the …

We present a new method for numerical propagation through Lyot-style coronagraphs using
finite occulting masks. Standard methods for coronagraphic simulations involve Fast Fourier …