This week I’ve continued the task of assembling new targets for ESPRI. We require a “secondary” or “reference” star next to each star that we survey for planets. That way, if the target star hosts a giant planet, then the secondary star serves as the reference point by which we can measure the orbit recoil […]
I wrote a python/matplotlib script to visualize the command I send to our deformable mirror in terms of voltage applied to the bimorph electrodes. We want to avoid using too much stroke to compensate for the rest state trifoil figure. The max/min voltage is +/- 400 V. From this plot, it’s clear that only the […]
The ESPRI team that I am part of at MPIA aspires to detect exoplanets based on the orbital recoil motion of their host stars. These are the “wobbles” like the ones our own Sun traces out due to the gravitational tug from the planets in the solar system. There are severe engineering obstacles to making […]
In the AO lab here at MPIA, we are building and testing a near-infrared wave front sensor for the four 8-meter VLT telescopes, to be used for long-baseline interferometry projects like GRAVITY. My role is to characterize and calibrate the deforming element on our test bench, the MACAO 60-actuator bimorph mirror. In the fall, after […]
progress…before/after application of KLIP subtraction to an IFS cube (lab data).
Here I rewrite the recipe of the KLIP PSF-subtraction algorithm by Soummer & Pueyo & Larkin (2012) in vector form — less of the confusing indices and easier to code: Assemble the reference images into matrix , containing K rows, each one a reference image vector of length N pixels. Subtract the mean of each […]
Here’s an example of an easy way to form a pixel-wise image mask based on a compound logical condition, using numpy’s where routine. In this example, img is your 2-d image array: Numpy’s all implements the “AND” condition; to do a logical “OR”, use the similar any routine.
tiredlight 