SGER: Pathfinder Demonstration of Stabilized Speckle Integral Field Spectroscopy

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Telescopes on the ground must observe objects in deep space through the interference of the earth's atmosphere. As light passes through the atmosphere it gets spread into rapidly varying "speckle" patterns by turbulence due to wind shear and changes in the atmosphere's temperature and pressure. This effectively diminishes the resolving power of earth-based telescopes. There are two primary techniques to correct for these effects: speckle imaging and adaptive optics. Adaptive optics is very successful but is also very complex and expensive to install, maintain, and operate. The speckle technique uses a fast camera to record the motion of the objects seen through the telescope. After the data are gathered, post-processing software is used to shift and align the image frames so that they can be added together to generate a higher-resolution picture. There are many kinds of astronomical science that benefit greatly from improved image resolution. Dr. Eikenberry is pursuing a technique that would enable the speckle technique to be used in real-time. This would allow not only immediate image reconstruction but also permit the higher resolution telescope light to be passed on to another instrument. His goal is to feed the light into a spectrograph which spreads the light out like a rainbow. With the higher resolution that his technique will enable, scientists will be able to learn how the characteristics (relative velocities and chemical composition) of objects vary with position. Dr. Eikenberry is mentoring a graduate student whose PhD thesis work will involve developing the new prototype instrument.