Independent of telescope aperture, atmospheric turbulence limits a telescope's ability to resolve detail in astronomic images and spectrographic measurements. The goal of this website is to improve telescopic spatial resolution by instituting atmospheric turbulence correction in a low cost methodology that is affordable to amateur astronomers. Conceiving such correction mechanisms, however, requires a good understanding of atmospheric turbulence itself and to that end, this section gives papers regarding my atmospheric turbulence characterization and research efforts.
This movie acquaints the reader with an atmospherically distorted star image, produced by random inhomogeneities in the atmosphere's refractive index. In this movie the star seems to "boil" and have modest x-y jitter (tip/tilt movement) because the telescope's aperture of 0.5 meters includes many "seeing cells". A seeing cell is quantified by the Fried coherence parameter as the diameter of a circular area with less than one radian rms wavefont error, and at this observatory Fried coherence ranges between 4 to 15 centimeters. In contrast, a smaller diameter telescope's image would exhibit less "boiling", but more and faster x-y jitter. A camera integrates star movement and makes a star's accumulated image much broader than otherwise occurring outside the Earth's atmosphere.
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