Frame Combination Techniques for Ultra High-Contrast Imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental pipeline for ultra high-contrast imaging that robustly combines image frames with various distortions and errors, enhancing data quality for systems like VLT SPHERE.

Contribution

It introduces a novel frame combination pipeline integrating multiple strategies to handle complex, real-world observational data for high-contrast imaging.

Findings

Pipeline effectively manages non-ideal data effects.

Preliminary tests show improved image quality.

Strategies are adaptable to various distortions.

Abstract

We summarize here an experimental frame combination pipeline we developed for ultra high-contrast imaging with systems like the upcoming VLT SPHERE instrument. The pipeline combines strategies from the Drizzle technique, the Spitzer IRACproc package, and homegrown codes, to combine image sets that may include a rotating field of view and arbitrary shifts between frames. The pipeline is meant to be robust at dealing with data that may contain non-ideal effects like sub-pixel pointing errors, missing data points, non-symmetrical noise sources, arbitrary geometric distortions, and rapidly changing point spread functions. We summarize in this document individual steps and strategies, as well as results from preliminary tests and simulations.