Abstract

Theoretical and applied investigations into application of lasers for generation of artificial guide stars [1,2] became very popular in the last years. I think it is suitable for me to return to some results which were received 10-15 years ago and published in Soviet scientific journals. The complete summary of these results was presented in Refs. 3-8. To the broad circle of foreign researchers they become more accessible after publication of my book [9].

In that time I was involved into a problem of stabilization of a laser direction diagram. For this purpose in the focal plane of a telescope we were tracking the image of a reference beacon. In the framework of this work for a beam which passed through turbulent media and an image formed by the same optical system 1 calculated the mutual correlation of random shifts or centroids. It was assumed that the image can be the one formed by a real reference source (beacon) or by an optical beam reflected from some object.

© 1996 Optical Society of America