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

W. Watson wrote:
I'd be satisfied with with monochromatic sources. The only way I've ever been able to illustrate the concept, or get across the idea in some way, the is to take to either cover the aperture of say a Newtonian with a mask, or cover the surface of the mirror with a mask and show that individual areas are collectively capable of seeing a star. I may be fooling myself. In some way it shows that the ability of mirrors separated can be combined to produce a good quality image. So in a sense, the concept is "buyable".

That's the spatial filtering idea, done at the pupil--and it sounds like a good idea. However, a single interference term won't form an image in laser light either. I don't have a good Fourier optics demo right handy, but your idea of putting masks on a telescope aperture is a possibility--maybe you could use strips of coloured tape that you could take off and put back. That's not a strictly fair demo, of course, since N source regions will produce N(N-1)/2 spatial frequencies, but something like that would get the point across.


Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
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