Abstract

Antoine Labeyrie first pointed out in 1970 that short exposure pictures of astronomical objects can be analyzed in a simple way to recover information about the objects' structures down to the diffraction limit of a telescope. Labeyrie's method, which rather quickly came to be called speckle interferometry, takes advantage of the convolution theorem to separate the modulation transfer function of the telescope and atmosphere from the average squared-modulus of the two-dimensional Fourier transform of the object intensity. Alternatively and equivalently, the autocorrelations of speckle pictures can be produced and analyzed to study spatial structures in astronomical objects. Although speckle interferometry does not produce diffraction limited images, it has provided a wealth of new data in a wide variety of fields where the objects of interest have relatively simple morphologies usually characterized by combinations of point sources or only first order deviations from circular symmetry.

© 1983 Optical Society of America