Abstract

For centuries, astronomers have built larger telescopes attempting to collect more light so fainter objects could be studied, but resigned to the fact that such larger telescopes would not provide higher resolution. It was until 1970, when Antoine Labeyrie notice the significant difference between short-exposure and the long-exposure images astronomers were used to see. Labeyrie reasoned that each speckle present in the short-exposure image was actually a diffraction-limited image formed by the telescope. He concluded that a short-exposure image contains high resolution information not present in the long-exposure counterpart, and invented a method to extract such high resolution information that is termed speckle interferometry.

© 1995 Optical Society of America