Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Radio telescopes are frequently diffraction-limited, because the wavelengths they use (from millimeters to meters) are so long that the atmospheric distortion is negligible. 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.
diffraction pattern matching Dawes' limit. 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.
Since professional telescopes have diameters , they can only obtain an image resolution approaching their diffraction limits by employing adaptive optics. Because r 0 {\displaystyle r_{0}} is a function of wavelength, varying as λ 6 / 5 {\displaystyle \lambda ^{6/5}} , its value is only meaningful in relation to a specified wavelength.
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.
This absolute limit is called the diffraction limit (and may be approximated by the Rayleigh criterion, Dawes limit or Sparrow's resolution limit). This limit depends on the wavelength of the studied light (so that the limit for red light comes much earlier than the limit for blue light) and on the diameter of the telescope mirror. This means ...
Characterizing the form of the point-spread function by a single number, as the Strehl Ratio does, will be meaningful and sensible only if the point-spread function is little distorted from its ideal (aberration-free) form, which will be true for a well-corrected system that operates close to the diffraction limit. That includes most telescopes ...
For example, the blue star shows that the Hubble Space Telescope is almost diffraction-limited in the visible spectrum at 0.1 arcsecs, whereas the red circle shows that the human eye should have a resolving power of 20 arcsecs in theory, though normally only 60 arcsecs.
Etendue in free space. Consider a light source Σ, and a light detector S, both of which are extended surfaces (rather than differential elements), and which are separated by a medium of refractive index n that is perfectly transparent (shown). To compute the etendue of the system, one must consider the contribution of each point on the surface ...