Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2016
We present to the brown dwarf community the Near Infrared Coronographic Imager (NICI), which is being built for installation in 2005 on the Gemini South Telescope. NICI's dual channel architecture and dedicated AO system are designed to permit deep circumstellar discrimination of faint sources where some spectral key can be used to get a simultaneous estimate of the background. One of the principal science goals of NICI is to search for ultracool companions to stars and brown dwarfs.