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J.E. Krist (Space Telescope Science Institute)
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has proven to be an exceptional tool for high-contrast imaging of a wide variety of astronomical objects, including circumstellar disks, QSO host galaxies, and substellar companions. The high resolution provided by HST is a major factor in its high-contrast capability, but so is its relatively stable point-spread-function (PSF), which allows for the subtraction of light from the central source using a variety of methods. Even without a coronagraph, PSF subtraction allows the imaging of objects that are many times fainter than the local PSF background, even within an arcsecond of the central source. Compared to ground-based telescopes that are limited mostly to adaptive optical imaging at wavelengths beyond 1 micron, HST is able to do high-contrast work from the near-ultraviolet (200 nm) to the near-infrared (2 microns). This talk will review the current and future capabilities of HST for high- contrast imaging and will highlight some of its major results.