Coronagraph Contrast: Imaging an Exoplanet Next to Its Star

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 simulator renders that Airy field as a live log-intensity terrain, applies a coronagraph mask with a tunable inner working angle and raw contrast floor, and drops a companion planet into 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.