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2024 Sagan Summer Workshop

Advances in Direct Imaging: From Young Jupiters to Habitable Earths

Hands-On Sessions and Resources



There are three hands-on sessions during the 2024 Sagan Summer Workshop and we encourage all attendees to participate in as many as possible and in the group projects with informal presentations on Friday afternoon. Our goal is to allow both in-person and remote attendees participate in these sessions however support for remote attendees may be somewhat limited.

The hands-on sessions are described below. Check back on this page for more information as we develop the hands-on sessions and projects.

I: Optical Modeling - led by Emiel Por (STScI)

Optical modeling plays an integral part in designing and analyzing the performance of high-contrast imaging systems. This hands-on session will teach you the basics of how such diffraction calculations are performed, for both space- and ground-based telescopes, and will provide valuable insights into the behavior of light within complex optical systems. We will use HCIPy for all simulations in this session.

During this session, you will learn:

  • How to compute point-spread-functions for telescope pupils.
  • How different coronagraphs modify the light in pupil and focal planes.
  • How to visually identify common alignment issues in coronagraphic images.
  • How aberrations impact the coronagraphic image and how speckles interact.
  • How to compute throughput for off-axis sources.
  • Methods for speeding up computation of dynamic aberrations.


II: PSF Subtraction - led by Jason Wang (Northwestern/CIERA)

In this hands-on session, you will learn how to image and characterize exoplanets with real data. The core of this process is performing stellar point spread function (PSF) subtraction to remove the glare of the star and look for faint planets in the data. In this hands-on session, you will learn how to perform stellar PSF subtraction using the pyklip package and look for real planets in real data. From there, you will learn how to measure the significance of a detection, quantify the sensitivity of the data, and measure the properties of any exoplanets you detect.


III Yield Modeling and Mission Optimization - led by Rhonda Morgan (JPL) and Dmitry Savransky (Cornell)

Science yield modeling plays a key role in space mission development, including current efforts around the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Yield modeling allows scientists and engineers to explicitly test the impact of engineering decisions on possible mission outcomes, which is especially important for the technologically challenging case of exoplanet imaging.

The session organizers suggest that you review these pre-recorded short talks on the fundamental concepts of yield modeling posted here.

In this hands on session you will learn the basic techniques of exoplanet imaging yield modeling, including:

  • How to compute the probability of detecting an exoplanet around a given target star (completeness)
  • How to compute the expected yield for a full survey
  • How assumptions about astrophysical parameters impact yield
  • How to model integration times and how the choice of integration times impacts yield
  • How to model mission constraints and how these impact yield


Questions? Sagan_Workshop@ipac.caltech.edu

Workshop Code of Conduct.

2024 Workshop home page

(last updated March 28th, 2024 09:54:51)