Image Reconstruction from Speckle Interferograms, Speckle Spectroscopy and the Deconvolution of Space Telescope Data

Abstract

The turbulent atmosphere of the earth restricts the resolution of large ground-based telescopes to about 1 arc second. Much higher resolution can be obtained by various speckle methods 1-11. These methods yield exactly diffraction-limited resolution, for example 0.03 arc second in the case of a 3.6m telescope and for λ = 500nm. Many of these speckle methods can also be used to improve the resolution of large space telescopes if the resolution is limited by telescope aberrations. In the following text three examples of high-resolution speckle imaging are shown.