The unlikely rise of masking interferometry: leading the way with 19th century technology

Abstract

The exquisite precision delivered by interferometric techniques is rapidly being applied to more and more branches of optical astronomy. One particularly successful strategy to obtain structures at the scale of the diffraction limit is Aperture Masking Interferometry, which is presently experience a golden age with implementations at a host of large telescopes around the world. This startlingly durable technique, which turns 144 years old this year, presently sets the standard for the recovery of faint companions within a few resolution elements from the core of a stellar point spread function. This invited review will give a historical introduction and overview of the modern status of the technique, the science being delivered, and prospects for new advances and applications.

This is an invited review for SPIE Amsterdam in 2012. It presents a brief history of masking interferometry, and some thoughts on future progress. 11 pages, 4 figs, lots of refs

References in corpus (6)

• The Disk Around CoKu Tau/4: Circumbinary, not Transitional
• Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert I.: Upper Scorpius
• A close halo of large transparent grains around extreme red giant stars
• Mid-infrared size survey of Young Stellar Objects: Description of Keck segment-tilting experiment and basic results
• Pinwheels in the Quintuplet Cluster
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Building hybridized 28-baseline pupil-remapping photonic interferometers for future high resolution imaging
• NICMOS Kernel-Phase Interferometry I: Catalogue of Brown Dwarfs Observed in F110W and F170M
• Controlling petals using fringes: discontinuous wavefront sensing through sparse aperture interferometry at Subaru/SCExAO