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

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".

Phil Hobbs wrote:
W. Watson wrote:
I'm really looking for a way to explain this to people without a strong back ground in math or physics. Although I can explain Fourier analysis pretty easily by using sinusoidal drawings, it seems quite a bit more difficult to explain all that's necessary to illustrate to someone that images from two widely separated telescopes can produce an image that's equivalent to a telescope that's the size of distance between the two. It seems nearly impossible that it should be true, but I don't know of any simple method that will illustrate even approximately that's the case.


One reason it's hard to illustrate is that it isn't true. ;) You have to have lots of spatial frequencies, not just one or two...that's why setups like the VLA have movable dishes.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

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Wayne Watson (Nevada City, CA)

Web Page: <speckledwithStars.net>
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