SGER: Pathfinder Demonstration of Stabilized Speckle Integral Field Spectroscopy

地面上的望远镜必须通过地球大气层的干扰来观测深空中的物体。当光穿过大气层时，由于风切变和大气温度和压力的变化，它被湍流传播成快速变化的“斑点”模式。这有效地降低了地面望远镜的分辨能力。有两种主要的技术来纠正这些影响：散斑成像和自适应光学。自适应光学是非常成功的，但也非常复杂和昂贵的安装，维护和操作。散斑技术使用一台快速相机来记录通过望远镜看到的物体的运动。数据收集后，使用后处理软件对图像帧进行移动和对齐，以便将它们加在一起生成更高分辨率的图像。许多天文科学都从图像分辨率的提高中获益良多。艾肯伯里正在寻求一种技术，使斑点技术能够实时使用。这不仅可以立即重建图像，而且还可以将更高分辨率的望远镜光线传递到另一台仪器上。他的目标是将光送入光谱仪，光谱仪将光像彩虹一样散开。有了他的技术所带来的更高的分辨率，科学家们将能够了解物体的特征（相对速度和化学成分）是如何随位置而变化的。艾肯伯里博士正在指导一名研究生，他的博士论文工作将涉及开发新的原型仪器。

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.