Stellar Optical Interferometry in the 1990s

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Abstract
The unaided eye has an angular resolution of about 1 arcminute. From the invention of the telescope in the 17th century to the middle of the 1970s, astronomers improved on this resolution by two orders of magnitude by building bigger telescopes and putting them at good sites. Even at good sites, however, atmospheric turbulence limits the resolution at visible and infrared wavelengths to 1 arcsec or a little better. In the past 20 years, a further factor‐of‐ten improvement has come with two developments that deal with the atmosphere: “speckle interferometry,” in which the blurred image is frozen in a short exposure and the image is reconstructed from many exposures, and adaptive optics, in which the effects of the atmosphere are sensed, then corrected with a defbrmable mirror, before the image is recorded. (See Laird A. Thompson's article in PHYSICS TODAY, December 1994, page 24.) After a decades‐long wait for the necessary technology to develop, optical interferometers will soon yield improved images of stars and precise measurements of stellar positions, motions and diameters.

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