Authors

Matthew Kenworthy, Johanan Codona

Affiliations

Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands Steward Observatory, Tucson, AZ, USA

Abstract

Differences in the optical path of the science camera and the adaptive optics wavefront sensor give rise to slowly varying non common path errors, resulting in quasi-static speckles in the focal plane. These speckles limit the achievable contrast on current telescope and future ELTs for extrasolar planet detection and characterization.

We present on-sky results obtained at the MMTO 6.5m telescope in Arizona, where we have solved for the complex amplitude of the non common path error using short exposure high strehl science camera images and telemetry from the wavefront sensor camera using our Phase Sorting Interferometry technique. We can now reconstruct model point spread functions for each science camera frame and remove the quasistatic speckles out to several diffraction widths of the science camera PSF.