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Angular resolution describes the ability of any image-forming device such as an optical or radio telescope, a microscope, a camera, or an eye, to distinguish small details of an object, thereby making it a major determinant of image resolution.
The ability of a lens to resolve detail is usually determined by the quality of the lens, but is ultimately limited by diffraction.Light coming from a point source in the object diffracts through the lens aperture such that it forms a diffraction pattern in the image, which has a central spot and surrounding bright rings, separated by dark nulls; this pattern is known as an Airy pattern, and ...
Dawes' limit is a formula to express the maximum resolving power of a microscope or telescope. [1] It is so named after its discoverer, William Rutter Dawes, [2] although it is also credited to Lord Rayleigh. The formula takes different forms depending on the units.
Space-based telescopes (such as Hubble, or a number of non-optical telescopes) always work at their diffraction limit, if their design is free of optical aberration. The beam from a laser with near-ideal beam propagation properties may be described as being diffraction-limited. A diffraction-limited laser beam, passed through diffraction ...
As an example, a telescope having an f /6 objective and imaging at 0.55 micrometers has a spatial cutoff frequency of 303 cycles/millimeter. High-resolution black-and-white film is capable of resolving details on the film as small as 3 micrometers or smaller, thus its cutoff frequency is about 150 cycles/millimeter.
The Rayleigh criterion for barely resolving two objects that are point sources of light, such as stars seen through a telescope, is that the center of the Airy disk for the first object occurs at the first minimum of the Airy disk of the second. This means that the angular resolution of a diffraction-limited system is given by the same formulae.
The f-number N is given by: = where f is the focal length, and D is the diameter of the entrance pupil (effective aperture).It is customary to write f-numbers preceded by "f /", which forms a mathematical expression of the entrance pupil's diameter in terms of f and N. [1]
Seeing is a major limitation to the angular resolution in astronomical observations with telescopes that would otherwise be limited through diffraction by the size of the telescope aperture. Today, many large scientific ground-based optical telescopes include adaptive optics to overcome seeing.