Surveying the Epsilon Eridani system Using MagAO

Abstract

© 2018 SPIE. The Epsilon Eridani system is a star system ∼10 ly away predicted to be similar to our solar system, making it a particularly interesting target for exoplanet detection. A Jupiter-like exoplanet has been predicted at 1.88 arcsec using radial velocity techniques, and an outer debris disk has been imaged at 35 - 90 AU with Spitzer and CSO observations. We present a preliminary survey of the inner system using the MagAO instrument with the Magellan Clay telescope in Chile. We apply and evaluate the Karhunen-Loeve Image Projection technique, which estimates the point spread function (PSF) of the central star for high-contrast imaging using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We perform this analysis by adapting the pyKLIP package, which was developed for analyzing data from the Gemini Planet Imager instrument, to be used with data from the MagAO/VisAO instrument.