Digital coronagraphy: application to space telescope images

Abstract

Optical coronagraphy is a high contrast image technique used in astronomy to reduce light around a host star and make viable the detection of faint companions and the exploration of circumstellar disks. Digital coronagraphy consists of the digital processing of non-coronagraphic images acquired by space telescopes in order to reproduce the operation of a standard optical coronagraph. Digital coronagraphy presents significant advantages as no real coronagraph or extra device has to be manufactured and sent to space. In this paper, comparison of digital and optical coronagraph performances is accomplished both by numerical simulations that include detection noise and the use of archived images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Our analysis indicates that the attainable contrast with both techniques is comparable, though the required Lyot stop in digital coronagraphy differs from the standard one. Furthermore, the evolution of contrast as a function of the distance to the main star that we have encountered with the optical coronagraph is similar to that shown by different authors for the optical NIC2/COR coronagraph. Finally, although digital coronagraphy cannot substitute optical coronagraphs, it can be considered as an interesting tool for the analysis of actual system performance.