Re: Looking for an Example of Interferometry to Illustrate Increased Resolution

W. Watson wrote:
Yes, basically VLB. Maybe this is like relativity in that it may not be a simple matter to provide table top model of something, or a simple easy to construct demo that illustrates some facet of relativity. Although, there's a popular book Physics Visualized that more or less opens the door to some understanding of it with a traveling clock in a cart on rail. It shows a clock that consists to two mirrors at the end of cylinder. Light is bouncing between the two surfaces taking the same travel time, then the cart begins to move, and one sees the path between travel lengths increase. Actually, there are several illustrations in that book that get across some ideas of relativity.

Helpful person wrote:
On Jan 27, 3:42 pm, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I think the OP is talking about sparse synthetic aperture techniques
such as VLBI (Very long baseline interferometry).

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Maybe, but in that case one probably has to carefully define
resolution.


This is more of a Fourier demo than an interferometry demo--there are lots of spatial filtering demos around, e.g. in Hecht & Zajac. It isn't _interferometry_, though it is _interference_, that gives the resolution improvement with wider apertures. A single interferometer just gives you a sinusoidal fringe pattern...you need lots of sinusoids with lots of different spatial frequencies to make any kind of image.

Of course, if you know enough *a priori* about what you're looking at, e.g. that it's a uniformly ruled plane grating, you can get all you need from that one Fourier component.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
.

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