» The Lyot Project
The Lyot Project
The Lyot Project Coronagraph without its enclosure during preparations before a night of observing.
The Lyot Project is a multifaceted research and development program based at the American Museum of Natural History. The project is designed to advance the techniques and science required for exoplanetary science, with a particular emphasis on the combination of adaptive optics and coronagraphy. The project is named to honor Bernard Ferdinand Lyot (1897-1952), inventor of the solar coronagraph, an instrument which on 12 July 1931 acquired the first images of the Sun's corona without a solar eclipse.
Gold mirrors that act as optical stops. The three two-inch mirrors at the top have tiny holes in their centers which remove most of the light of a target star from the image.
The Lyot Project's initial goal has now been achieved: the construction, deployment and use of the world's first coronagraph optimized for, and operating at, the diffraction limit of a telescope (a direct extension of Lyot's original idea to its physical limit in application to imaging the regions around stars other than the Sun). The project uses this instrument not only for a survey of nearby stars, but also as a basis for the investigation, development and implementation of advanced concepts in extremely high-contrast imaging.
Our program represents a critical step toward the long-term goal of directly imaging and studying exoplanets.
More detail can be found at lyot.org.
