Abstract
The imaging process that we have described in Chap. 3 suffers from atmospheric turbulence perturbing the incoming wave front by random index of refraction fluctuations. This effect is caused by turbulent mixing of air with different temperature so that the image quality in large telescopes is far from the diffraction limit but corresponds to telescopes with a few 10 cm diameter. Operating interferometers on the ground, the fringe pattern is wiped out unless the integration times are limited to a about 100 ms.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that, despite the time difference between the amplitudes being zero, the temporal average is taken over a long time.
- 2.
The notation of the dimension as m2/m− 2 is chosen since we describe the power in m2 per surface element in frequency space,\(\mathrm{d}\vec{\kappa }\), in m− 2.
- 3.
The PSF as dimensionless quantity requires to divide the intensity byV 0 (3.3). Since we setV 0 = 1 this will not be noted explicitly.
- 4.
One should note that it was Fried’s original intention to definer 0 as the equivalent telescope diameter, [71].
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Glindemann, A. (2011). Atmospheric Turbulence. In: Principles of Stellar Interferometry. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15028-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15028-9_4
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