Abstract
The formation of direct, high-resolution stellar images is severely limited due to the presence of atmospheric turbulence. Such turbulence causes random perturbations of a wavefront propagating through the atmosphere. Direct stellar images therefore consist of low spatial frequency information only and any detailed object structure is lost. In an attempt to overcome this problem a number of indirect image-forming techniques have been proposed in the literature. The present work is a comparative study of a few of these. The methods, in general, consist of averaging a quantity that is dependent on a transfer function which has significant value at all spatial frequencies out to the telescope diffraction limit. In particular the relative merits of the triple correlation techniques of Lohmann et al.1 and the method of Knox and Thompson2 are studied. The signal-to-noise ratios for both high light level and photon-limited images are compared between each technique.
© 1986 Optical Society of America
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