Intensity masking to get high-resolution images from low-quality apertures

James P. Theiler; William C. Priedhorsky

doi:10.1117/12.279712

31 October 1997 Intensity masking to get high-resolution images from low-quality apertures

James P. Theiler, William C. Priedhorsky

Proceedings Volume 3170, Image Reconstruction and Restoration II; (1997) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.279712
Event: Optical Science, Engineering and Instrumentation '97, 1997, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

The effort and expense required to build and maintain an optical-quality telescope increases dramatically with the size of the telescope aperture, and this is especially so in space. But scenarios have been proposed for deploying 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 wavelengths out of figure. The technique is limited to monochromatic imagery, though the wavelength at which observations are taken can be easily 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 pupil of the telescope, which permits implementation on a large scale. A similar approach, in which the pixels of the mask are half-wave phase shifters instead of opaque optical elements, was described by Love et al.

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James P. Theiler and William C. Priedhorsky "Intensity masking to get high-resolution images from low-quality apertures", Proc. SPIE 3170, Image Reconstruction and Restoration II, (31 October 1997); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.279712

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