IMPROVING THE RESOLUTION OF GROUND-BASED TELESCOPES

Atmospheric turbulence profoundly limits the angular resolution of ast ronomical telescopes working at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. In fact, the angular resolution for conventional imaging through turb ulence is on the order of 5-20 % of the diffraction-limited resolution at the best observatories in the world. The origin of these performan ce degradations turbulence-induced fluctuations in the index of refrac tion of the atmosphere. index-of-refraction fluctuations producing the optical path length of the atmosphere to be random in both space and time, producing random aberrations in the telescope pupil that degrade imaging performance. Over the past several years significant advances have been made in developing both hardware and image processing-based techniques for improving the resolution of astronomical telescopes. H ardware-oriented correction techniques are based on wave-front sensing and adaptive optics. Image-processing-based methods include speckle-i maging techniques and hybrid imaging techniques that use elements of a daptive-optics systems and image reconstruction. Analysis techniques f or predicting the performance of these imaging methods have been devel oped, and the comparative performance of these imaging techniques has been examined. This paper discusses turbulence and image-detection sta tistics, describes the fundamentals of methods for overcoming turbulen ce effects, and provides representative performance results.