| Intensity Masking to Get High Resolution Images From Low Quality Apertures (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| The effort and expense required to build and maintain an optical-quality telescope increases dramatically with the size of the telescope aperture, 1 and this is especially so in space. But scenarios have been proposed for deploying (for instance, inflatable) telescopes with very large but considerably less than optical-quality apertures. Our interest is in ameliorating the effects of the low quality aperture in order to exploit the raw size of the aperture to obtain high resolution images. We describe an algorithm for generating an adaptive binary mask to correct the time-varying aberrations of very large apertures which are many (possibly hundreds of) wavelengths out of figure. The technique is limited to monochromatic imagery, though the wavelength at which observations are taken can be readily changed on the fly, and for earth-pointing applications, the limited light-gathering power imposed by the monochromatic filter is not a problem. The mask itself can be placed at the exit pup... | |||||||||||||||
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