Thursday, February 14, 2013

Lucky Imaging

This is a nice little video of an amateur astronomer using a technique - "lucky imaging" - that astronomer's are using more and more.  The technique basically takes advantage of the fact that, if you take very short exposures (< 10 ms), occasionally the distortion from seeing is not large.  So if you can take a large number of exposures and only use the sharpest 5-10% of them, you can get an image that is much higher resolution.  Sometimes it can even approach the diffraction limit.  Of course, the method has a downside in that you have to throw away most of the images, most of the photons.  But if the objects you're photographing are bright, you can get away with it.


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