Space-time analysis of photon-limited stellar speckle interferometry

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Abstract
The standard method of stellar speckle interferometry, in which short exposure photographs are individually analyzed, is not the most general method of extracting object information from the time-varying image intensity. We introduce a space-time analysis in which both spatial and temporal fluctuations are taken into account; the aim is to measure the power spectrum of the image with an increased signal to noise ratio. Surprisingly, our more general space-time analysis does not yield an improved signal to noise ratio at very low light levels.