Abstract: We saw in the chapter on atmospheric turbulence that the real limitation to the resolution of a ground-based telescope is not the diameter of the telescope aperture, but the atmosphere. As a result, a telescope of any diameter will rarely give an angular resolution in visible light better than 1 arcsec, which is equivalent to the diffraction limit of an aperture of about 10 cm diameter (the Fried parameter, r0, defined in section 5.4.1). This limitation has been considered so fundamental that large telescope mirrors might not even have been polished to an accuracy which could give a better resolution than this. The ideas behind the various methods of astronomical interferometry are all directed at exceeding it.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-06-29
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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