A new data acquisition system for measuring the movement of atmospheric speckle patterns

To measure the movement of atmospheric speckle patterns, we establish a new data acquisition system that consists of a 50 cm telescope, an intensified charge-coupled device (ICCD) camera, a photomultiplier with a pinhole, and two personal computers (PCs) including data acquisition hardware. This sys tem is easy to establish and allows the capture of a high-resolution image. A simple positioning method of the pinhole in front of the photomultiplier is introduced. With 1500 pairs of the measurement data samples, a clear co rrelation peak can be found by processing them according to the general def inition of correlation. Some measurement and analysis results are given. (C ) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(99)04404-4].