74,824 research outputs found
Apodized-pupil Lyot coronagraphs: multistage designs for extremely large telescopes
Earlier apodized-pupil Lyot coronagraphs (APLC) have been studied and
developed to enable high-contrast imaging for exoplanet detection and
characterization with present-day ground-based telescopes. With the current
interest in the development of the next generation of telescopes, the future
extremely large telescopes (ELTs), alternative APLC designs involving
multistage configuration appear attractive. The interest of these designs for
application to ELTs is studied. Performance and sensitivity of multistage APLC
to ELT specificities are analyzed and discussed, taking into account several
ineluctable coronagraphic telescope error sources by means of numerical
simulations. Additionally, a first laboratory experiment with a two-stages-APLC
in the near-infrared (H-band) is presented to further support the numerical
treatment. Multistage configurations are found to be inappropriate to ELTs. The
theoretical gain offered by a multistage design over the classical single-stage
APLC is largely compromised by the presence of inherent error sources occurring
in a coronagraphic telescope, and in particular in ELTs. The APLC remains an
attractive solution for ELTs, but rather in its conventional single-stage
configuration.Comment: A&A accepte
Band-Limited Coronagraphs using a halftone-dot process: II. Advances and laboratory results for arbitrary telescope apertures
The band-limited coronagraph is a nearly ideal concept that theoretically
enables perfect cancellation of all the light of an on-axis source. Over the
past years, several prototypes have been developed and tested in the
laboratory, and more emphasis is now on developing optimal technologies that
can efficiently deliver the expected high-contrast levels of such a concept.
Following the development of an early near-IR demonstrator, we present and
discuss the results of a second-generation prototype using halftone-dot
technology. We report improvement in the accuracy of the control of the local
transmission of the manufactured prototype, which was measured to be less than
1%.
This advanced H-band band-limited device demonstrated excellent contrast
levels in the laboratory, down to 10-6 at farther angular separations than 3
lambda/D over 24% spectral bandwidth. These performances outperform the ones of
our former prototype by more than an order of magnitude and confirm the
maturity of the manufacturing process.
Current and next generation high-contrast instruments can directly benefit
from such capabilities. In this context, we experimentally examine the ability
of the band-limited coronagraph to withstand various complex telescope
apertures.Comment: Accepted in ApJ - under pres
Interoperability between Multimedia Collections for Content and Metadata-Based Searching
Artiste is a European project developing a cross-collection search system for art galleries and museums. It combines image content retrieval with text based retrieval and uses RDF mappings in order to integrate diverse databases. The test sites of the Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Uffizi Gallery and National Gallery London provide their own database schema for existing metadata, avoiding the need for migration to a common schema. The system will accept a query based on one museum’s fields and convert them, through an RDF mapping into a form suitable for querying the other collections. The nature of some of the image processing algorithms means that the system can be slow for some computations, so the system is session-based to allow the user to return to the results later. The system has been built within a J2EE/EJB framework, using the Jboss Enterprise Application Server
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