Abstract
The atmosphere of the earth restricts the resolution of conventional astronomical imaging to about 1″. Much higher resolution can be obtained by speckle methods. Speckle interferometry, the Knox-Thompson method and the speckle masking method (bispectrum or triple correlation processing) yield diffraction-limited resolution in spite of image degradation by the atmosphere and telescope aberrations. For example, with the ESO 3.6-m telescope a resolution of 0.028″ is attained at a wavelength of 400 nm. The limiting magnitude is about 18. We will outline the theory behind the three methods. High-resolution images and simultaneously the spectrum of each resolution element can be obtained by the objective prism speckle spectroscopy and projection speckle spectroscopy methods. Finally, we will discuss the application of speckle masking to coherent arrays of telescopes. A very interesting example is the 4x8-m ESO VLT, which should yield the fantastic angular resolution of about 2 milli-arcsec.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag
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Weigelt, G. (1989). Interferometric imaging in optical astronomy. In: Appenzeller, I., Habing, H.J., Léna, P. (eds) Evolution of Galaxies Astronomical Observations. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 333. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51315-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51315-9_6
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