Circularly Symmetric Apodization via Star‐shaped Masks

Recently, we introduced a class of shaped pupil masks, called spiderwebmasks, that produce point spread functions having annular dark zones. With suchmasks, a single image can be used to probe a star for extrasolar planets. Inthis paper, we introduce a new class of shaped pupil masks that also provideannular dark zones. We call these masks starshaped masks. Given any circularlysymmetric apodization function, we show how to construct a correspondingstarshaped mask that has the same point-spread function (out to any given outerworking distance) as obtained by the apodization.