An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A high-contrast imaging technique that reduces minute temporal and spatial → seeing fluctuations and facilitates the detection of faint point sources, in close separation from their stars. It consists of the acquisition of a sequence of images with an → altazimuth mounting telescope while the instrument field derotator is switched off. This keeps the instrument and telescope optics aligned and allows the field of view to rotate with respect to the instrument. For each image, a reference → point spread function (PSF) is constructed from other appropriately selected images of the same sequence and subtracted to remove quasistatic PSF structure (Marois et al. 2006, ApJ 641, 556).

See also: → angular; → differential; → imaging.