Questions tagged [interferometry]
Questions about astronomical observations which involve superimposing waves received by multiple, physically separated, receivers to obtain higher angular resolution.
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Will the Magdalena Ridge Optical Interferometer be able to image extended objects like the surface of the Moon?
Inspired by several questions:
When will a moon landing site be visible via telescope?
Could the E.H.T. produce an image of the human artifacts on the moon?
Picture of equipment left on the Moon?
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Has optical interferometry been done at radio frequency using heterodyning with a laser in a nonlinear material?
If one collects narrow band optical emission from a large telescope with frequency $f_1$ and mixes it in a nonlinear crystal with laser light of a nearby frequency $f_2$, it would produce two new ...
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Would "layered" radio interferometry work?
tl;dr - Is splitting up the process of interferometry as shown in the diagram possible, and if so, is it more efficient and/or easier than traditional methods?
I have been doing some research into ...
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What makes small interferometers useful? Like NIRISS on JWST
NIRISS is an instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. It has a "non-redundant aperture mask" which obviously covers most of the area of the sensor. It seems to be advantageous for high contrast ...
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How did Michelson measure the diameters of jupiter's moons using optical interferometry?
In Betelgeuse: How its Diameter was measured (Chant, C. A., Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 15, p.133, Bibliographic Code: 1921JRASC..15..133C) the author says:
The paper in ...
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Is Optical VLBI theoretically feasible? If not why not?
There are plenty of optical interferometers in use with baselines of up to maybe 1km. As far as I can find out, they all work by directly collecting the light at all the telescopes, using mirrors to ...
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Why don't we use amateur astronomers' telescopes to create a huge interferometer?
Some telescopes in space have been proposed to function as an interferometer.
Being placed several hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart they could actual image exoplanets directly. To my ...
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Reference request (explaining) how optical correlators combine light from multiple telescopes to produce ultra-high resolution interferometric images?
This is a reference or resource-request because it may be too challenging to explain in an answer post, but if you'd like to attempt a short summary as well, that will be great!
I have a basic ...
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Was GRAVITY built to look at one star?
GRAVITY (shown below) is a interferometric combiner of near infrared light from four very large telescopes called The Very Large Telescope in order to make careful astrometric measurements near the ...
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What are the raisons d'être for the Large Binocular Telescope "binocularity"?
edit: The short form of the question is Why are there TWO telescopes?? A longer version follows.
The Large Binocular Telescope (and LBT blog as source of images below) has two 8.4 meter diameter ...
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Why not us interferometry to take a picture of Pluto?
Interferometry is among the best ways (if not, the best way!) to have an image of a very distant object.
Recently a picture of the black hole at the center of M87 was released. It is the result of ...
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Can weak gravitational lensing or microlensing-induced wavefront distortion limit resolution of absurdly large aperture telescopes?
This is a theoretical question.
This answer to the question If we had the right technology could we see a distant star in detail? (presumably space-based) primarily addresses the scaling of ...
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In astronomical interferometry, what values do the points in the uv-plane have?
As I understand it, the image of an interferometer is the inverse fourier transform of the information in the uv plane. For each baseline (vector between any two telescopes in the array), representing ...
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Have interference effects (in space) ever been observed by a single instrument, as opposed to interferometry?
Not asking about:
Interferometry can be done with multiple instruments who's light paths or signals are combined interferometrically, or even between different parts of a single aperture, e.g.
What ...
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Converting Jy/beam to Jy?
Maybe its a dumb question, but to convert Jy/beam to Jy, I just have to multiply it by the beam size in sr right?
Being $\Omega$ the beam size:
$\Omega = \frac{\pi \theta_{maj} ~~ \theta_{min}}{4 \...
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