Apodizing Phase Plate (APP): Imaging
APP Imaging is offered with NaCo since P86 with either the narrow-band filter NB_4.05 or the broad band filter L_prime. It can be combined with cube mode and pupil tracking in Service Mode or Visitor Mode.
The APP is a phase plate introcuded in a pupil plane which reduces the flux of the PSf and its diffraction rings on one side. A deeper contrast is thus achieved between 2 lambda/D to 7 lambda/D. The peak intensity is reduced by 40 to 45% compared to observations without APP in NB_4.05 and L_prime respectively. Because of a 19-arcsec vertical shift introduced by the APP (see User Manual) the Field of View is considerably reduced to about 4x8 arcsec using the L27 camera.
New: commissioning (april 2010) data sets are now available in the archive: