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察深空的物体。 当光线穿过大气层时，由于风切变和大气温度和压力的变化而引起的湍流，光线传播成快速变化的“斑点”图案。 这实际上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。 自适应光学非常成功，但安装、维护和操作也非常复杂和昂贵。 散斑技术使用快速照相机来记录通过望远镜看到的物体的运动。 在收集数据之后，使用后处理软件来移动和对齐图像帧，以便将它们添加到一起以生成更高分辨率的图片。 许多天文科学都从提高图像分辨率中获益匪浅。艾肯伯里博士正在研究一种技术，使斑点技术能够实时使用。 这不仅可以立即重建图像，还可以将更高分辨率的望远镜光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展开。 随着他的技术将实现更高的分辨率，科学家将能够了解物体的特性（相对速度和化学成分）如何随位置而变化。 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.