Abstract

The atmosphere of the earth restricts the resolution of conventional astrophotography to about 1 arcsec. We will describe various speckle methods which can overcome image degradation caused by the atmosphere and telescope aberrations. These speckle methods yield diffraction-limited resolution, for example 0.03 arcsec for a 3.6m telescope. All methods can be applied to faint astronomical objects. In this case each speckle interferogram consists of a small number of photon events.

© 1986 Optical Society of America