On-sky speckle nulling demonstration at small angular separation with SCExAO

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates on-sky speckle nulling at small angular separations using SCExAO at Subaru, showing potential for applying laboratory high-contrast imaging algorithms to ground-based telescopes despite suboptimal conditions.

Contribution

First on-sky demonstration of speckle nulling with SCExAO, highlighting its effectiveness under less-than-ideal observing conditions.

Findings

Speckle nulling suppresses static and slow speckles on-sky.

Effective even with a brighter dynamic speckle halo.

Laboratory-developed algorithms are applicable to ground-based systems.

Abstract

This paper presents the first on-sky demonstration of speckle nulling, which was achieved at the Subaru Telescope in the context of the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) Project. Despite the absence of a high-order high-bandwidth closed-loop AO system, observations conducted with SCExAO show that even in poor-to-moderate observing conditions, speckle nulling can be used to suppress static and slow speckles even in the presence of a brighter dynamic speckle halo, suggesting that more advanced high-contrast imaging algorithms developed in the laboratory can be applied to ground-based systems.