On-sky Demonstration of Subdiffraction-limited Astronomical Measurement Using a Photonic Lantern

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

Y.J.K thanks B. Hansen for helpful discussions. The authors would like to thank J. Laverty and S. Cunningham, the Subaru Telescope operators during the observations. Y.J.K. acknowledges support from the Thacher Fellowship. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. 2109231, 2109232, 2308360, and 2308361. The development of SCExAO is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Research Nos. 23340051, 26220704, 23103002, 19H00703, 19H00695, and 21H04998), the Subaru Telescope, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the Astrobiology Center of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan, the Mt Cuba Foundation, and the Heising–Simons Foundation. E.H. acknowledges funding support for the FIRST project by the French National Research Agency (ANR-21-CE31-0005). E.H. and S.L. acknowledge funding from the project “Photonics” financed by the ANR program PEPR Origins (ANR-22-EXOR-0005). This research is based on data collected at the Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community, and are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

Facilities

Subaru - Subaru Telescope(SCExAO).

Software References

SciPy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020), NumPy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), Matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007).

Contributions

M.P.F., N.J., S.L.-S., S.S., B.N., and O.G. developed the vision for the use of PLs for high-angular-resolution astronomy with SCExAO at the Subaru Telescope; Y.J.K. developed the concept and conceived the observing and image reconstruction strategy under the guidance of M.P.F. and in discussion with O.G., J. Lin, and Y.X.; S.L.-S., S.Y., R.A.-C., B.N., and A.T. designed and fabricated the 19-port PL; M. Lallement, S.V., E.H., and S.L. designed and installed the FIRST-PL spectrometer at SCExAO; S.V., M. Lallement, E.H., S.L., M.N., and J.S. designed and integrated the PL injection setup at SCExAO, with the technical guidance of O.G., N.J., B.N., and M.P.F.; O.G., V.D., and M. Lucas designed and implemented the SCExAO software for data acquisition and logging; O.G., S.V., E.H., and S.L. selected the target for the observations; S.V. and Y.J.K. acquired data with the FIRST-PL camera and the internal PSF camera during the observations; O.G., J. Lozi, V.D., S.V., and M. Lucas operated the SCExAO and AO system during the observations; M. Lucas acquired calibration data for the internal PSF camera; Y.J.K. and M.P.F. developed strategies for the FIRST-PL detector calibration and spectral extraction and implemented the software; J. Lin, Y.J.K., Y.X., J. Lozi, and S.V. developed calibration and control software for experiments with PLs at SCExAO; and Y.J.K. performed daytime experiments with the FIRST-PL camera and the internal camera with assistance from J. Lozi, S.V., V.D., J. Lin, Y.X., and M. Lucas, created the response-map modeling and image reconstruction software, led the data analysis and interpretation with guidance from M.P.F., and wrote the manuscript with input from all co-authors.