Experimental performance of homothetic mapping for wide-field interferometric imaging

Abstract

Homothetic mapping is an aperture synthesis technique that allows interferometric imaging over a wide field-of-view. A laboratory experiment was set up to demonstrate the feasibility of this technique. Here, we present the first static experiments on homothetic mapping that have been done on the Delft Testbed for Interferometry (DTI). Before a changeable telescope configuration is provided, we first took a fixed telescope configuration and tested the algorithms for their ability to provide an exit pupil configuration before beam combination, that was an exact copy of this telescope configuration. By doing so, we created a homothetic imaging system. This is an imaging system that acts as a masked aperture monolithic telescope, but consists of (in our case) three telescopes of which the light follow their own optical trains.