PHOTON BIAS COMPENSATION IN TRIPLE CORRELATION IMAGING AND OBSERVATION OF R-136

We report diffraction-limited speckle masking observations of the cent ral object R 136 in the 30 Doradus Nebula, and we describe a new metho d for the compensation of the 4-dimensional photon bias terms in the a verage bispectrum. More than 40 stellar components are present in the 4.9 x 4.9 field of view of our reconstructed images. The closest binar ies found have separations between 0.03 and 0.05. Because of the large number of photon events in our speckle interferograms, it was not pos sible to apply photon counting techniques. Therefore, the extended pho ton events caused various frequency-dependent bias terms in the averag e image bispectrum. To overcome this influence of photon noise, we hav e developed a new technique for the compensation of the 4-dimensional photon bias terms in the bispectrum. We describe the theory of the met hod and demonstrate its feasibility by various image reconstruction ex periments.