Fig. 1: An image of Beta Pic's companion taken with the apodising phase plate on VLT/NaCo, after processing. The light from the central star was blocked out (in processing). Credit: ESO

Astronomers have many ways of spotting exoplanets round far away stars – but getting a direct look at them, especially with ground-based telescopes, remains a difficult job. With a planet emitting very little light of its own, and appearing to us essentially on top of the host star, its radiation is completely drowned in the image of the star. Catching those few photons and separating them from the flood of light from the star requires some clever observational tricks. To do this with ground-based telescopes, we at the very least need adaptive optics, to prevent the atmosphere from creating a blurry mess and  keep the image nice and sharp, and often some sort of mask that will block out as much as possible of the stellar light. But an upgrade to one of ESO’s near-infrared workhorse imager NaCo on VLT’s 4th Unit Telescope has just made it a whole lot easier.

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