[en] We describe and report first results from PALM-3000, the second-generation astronomical adaptive optics (AO) facility for the 5.1 m Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. PALM-3000 has been engineered for high-contrast imaging and emission spectroscopy of brown dwarfs and large planetary mass bodies at near-infrared wavelengths around bright stars, but also supports general natural guide star use to V ≈ 17. Using its unique 66 × 66 actuator deformable mirror, PALM-3000 has thus far demonstrated residual wavefront errors of 141 nm rms under ∼1'' seeing conditions. PALM-3000 can provide phase conjugation correction over a 6.''4 × 6.''4 working region at λ = 2.2 μm, or full electric field (amplitude and phase) correction over approximately one-half of this field. With optimized back-end instrumentation, PALM-3000 is designed to enable 10^–7 contrast at 1'' angular separation, including post-observation speckle suppression processing. While continued optimization of the AO system is ongoing, we have already successfully commissioned five back-end instruments and begun a major exoplanet characterization survey, Project 1640

[en] We report the detection of thermal emission from the hot Jupiter WASP-3b in the K_S band, using a newly developed guiding scheme for the WIRC instrument at the Palomar Hale 200 inch telescope. Our new guiding scheme has improved the telescope guiding precision by a factor of ∼5-7, significantly reducing the correlated systematics in the measured light curves. This results in the detection of a secondary eclipse with depth of 0.181% ± 0.020% (9σ)—a significant improvement in WIRC's photometric precision and a demonstration of the capability of Palomar/WIRC to produce high-quality measurements of exoplanetary atmospheres. Our measured eclipse depth cannot be explained by model atmospheres with heat redistribution but favors a pure radiative equilibrium case with no redistribution across the surface of the planet. Our measurement also gives an eclipse phase center of 0.5045 ± 0.0020, corresponding to an ecos ω of 0.0070 ± 0.0032. This result is consistent with a circular orbit, although it also suggests that the planet's orbit might be slightly eccentric. The possible non-zero eccentricity provides insight into the tidal circularization process of the star-planet system, but might also have been caused by a second low-mass planet in the system, as suggested by a previous transit timing variation study. More secondary eclipse observations, especially at multiple wavelengths, are necessary to determine the temperature-pressure profile of the planet's atmosphere and shed light on its orbital eccentricity.