Coronagraph Contrast: Imaging an Exoplanet Next to Its Star (2D)

Direct imaging of an exoplanet means separating a source a billion times fainter than its host star from starlight that has been spread by diffraction into a bright Airy pattern only a fraction of an arcsecond away. This 2D simulator renders that Airy pattern as a live simulated focal-plane image, lets you switch a coronagraph mask on or off, and applies a tunable inner working angle and raw contrast floor when it's engaged. A companion planet sits in the residual halo at a chosen separation and brightness ratio, drifting quasi-static speckles model the uncorrected wavefront errors that set the real noise floor of every ground- and space-based direct-imaging instrument, and a live signal-to-noise readout applies the standard 5σ detection threshold so you can see exactly when a planet slips below the mask's own leakage — or vanishes entirely without a mask at all.