Abstract
ABSTRACT The image quality obtainable with shift-and-add (SAA) imaging for the recovery of diffraction-limited information is quantitatively investigated using data simulating an 8-m aperture at a site with near-IR seeing conditions as found on Mauna Kea. This is compared to the image quality obtainable from image centroiding and wavefront tip-tilt correction. For good seeing conditions, image centroiding and SAA, which tracks the image peak, show similar performance containing about 30 percent of the image power in a diffraction-limited component. However, as the seeing degrades, SAA consistently yields improved resolution maintaining significantly greater diffraction-limited information. This enhances the detection threshold by about 2 magnitudes over the seeing-limited case for the seeing range studied. By comparison, the gain due to image centroiding decreases to less than 1 magnitude at the same poor seeing limit.
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