Sébastien Vievard, Julien Lozi, Subaru telescope
The Subaru Coronographic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument is a versatile high contrast instrument installed on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii (See Fig. 1 below). SCExAO benefits from a first stage of wavefront correction with the facility adaptive optics AO188 and splits the 600-2400 nm spectrum towards a variety of modules, in visible and near-infrared, optimized for a large range of science cases. Thanks to a pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS), SCExAO can perform a second stage of wavefront correction allowing to obtain a high Strehl ratio (>80% in median seeing in H-band) critical for high contrast imaging. One of SCExAO’s current science mission is to feed the integral field spectrograph CHARIS in J-, H-, or K-band for exoplanet detection and characterization. In the visible, SCExAO feeds the VAMPIRES module that performs differential polarization imaging sometimes coupled with non-redundant masking for diffraction limited scattered-light imaging of circumstellar environments.
The Subaru Coronographic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument is a versatile high contrast instrument installed on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii (See Fig. 1 below). SCExAO benefits from a first stage of wavefront correction with the facility adaptive optics AO188 and splits the 600-2400 nm spectrum towards a variety of modules, in visible and near-infrared, optimized for a large range of science cases. Thanks to a pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS), SCExAO can perform a second stage of wavefront correction allowing to obtain a high Strehl ratio (>80% in median seeing in H-band) critical for high contrast imaging. One of SCExAO’s current science mission is to feed the integral field spectrograph CHARIS in J-, H-, or K-band for exoplanet detection and characterization. In the visible, SCExAO feeds the VAMPIRES module that performs differential polarization imaging sometimes coupled with non-redundant masking for diffraction limited scattered-light imaging of circumstellar environments.
We would like to thank all our collaborators for their work and commitment to make SCExAO a competitive and efficient instrument. We also thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Research #23340051, #26220704 & #23103002), the Astrobiology Center of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Japan, the Mt Cuba foundation and the directors contingency fund at Subaru for their financial support. The SCExAO team wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.