Dragonfly: On-chip pupil remapping for optical stellar interferometry

Aperture masking has gained widespread use within the optical stellar interferometry community as a way of obtaining high fidelity imaging data on various classes of stellar targets [1]. Aperture masking involves apodizing the starlight at the pupil plane of a telescope, typically using a plate with many small sub-apertures, and then recombining the beams in a Fizeau interferometric scheme at the detector/camera. By appropriate analysis of the spatial interference pattern, it is possible to reconstruct an image with high fidelity. This has proven to be an extremely successful technique when imaging from ground-based telescopes as structures within the immediate vicinity of the diffraction-limited core are extremely difficult to recover with competing methods.