[Previous] | [Session 57] | [Next]
A.S. Hale (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), R. Dantowitz (Boston Museum of Science), M. Kozubel (Portents Software), S. Teare (New Mexico Institute of Technology), S.G. Gillam (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Adaptive optics systems have greatly increased the spatial resolutions achievable from the ground, but require extensive initial engineering and expense to be made workable. Other techniques focused on correcting only the major components of the seeing, such as shift-and-add (SAA) have had great success in increasing the resolution achievable from the ground without such initial effort. An improvement of the traditional shift and add technique is selective image reconstruction (SIR) (Dantowitz, 1998; Dantowitz et al., 2000; Baldwin et al. 2001) in which only those images taken at moments of perfect or near perfect seeing are added together to produce the final image. SIR can yield diffraction limited images when applied on a telescope with good optics and good natural seeing (Dantowitz et al. 2000), and is especially well suited to smaller aperture telescopes (Dantowitz 1998). Though this technique is more complicated to apply to extended objects than to point sources, it has been successfully applied to Mercury (Dantowitz et al., 2000) as well as other solar system, and has great potential for high spatial resolution studies of solar system objects.
We present results from a September observing run at Mount Wilson Observatory’s 60 inch telescope, and discuss planned improvements in instrumentation and future possibilities for solar system science. This work is supported by the Mount Wilson Institute and the National Research Council.
Baldwin, J. E.; Tubbs, R. N.; Cox, G. C.; Mackay, C. D.; Wilson, R. W.; Andersen, M. I., 2001, A&A 368, L1.
Dantowitz, R. 1998 Sky and Tel. 96, 48.
Dantowitz, R.; Teare, S.; Kozubal, M. 2000. AJ, 119, 2455.