The Four‐Quadrant Phase Mask Coronagraph. IV. First Light at the Very Large Telescope

We present the first high‐contrast images obtained at the ESO Very Large Telescope using a four‐quadrant phase mask coronagraph. The two‐night commissioning was carried out in 2004 January on NACO, the near‐IR camera with adaptive optics at UT4. We evaluated the behavior of the coronagraph on a variety of astrophysical targets: binary stars, circumstellar disks, and active galactic nuclei. The performance of the coronagraph is in agreement with our expectations based on numerical simulations. The phase mask provides a stellar peak attenuation of a factor of about 10 on average (for long exposure), and its performance is limited only by the phase residuals (mainly low‐order aberrations) that are left uncorrected by the adaptive optics system.