Recovering images from optical interferometric observations is one of the major challenges in the field. Unlike the case of observations at radio wavelengths, in the optical the atmospheric turbulence changes the phases on a very short time scale, which results in corrupted phase measurements. In order to overcome these limitations, several groups developed image reconstruction techniques based only on squared visibility and closure phase information, which are unaffected by atmospheric turbulence. We present the results of two techniques used by our group, which employed coherently integrated data from the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer. Based on these techniques we were able to recover complex visibilities for several sources and image them using standard radio imaging software. We describe these techniques, the corrections applied to the data, present the images of a few sources, and discuss the implications of these results.

Date Published: 28 July 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7013, Optical and Infrared Interferometry, 70131H (28 July 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.789487

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7013:
Optical and Infrared Interferometry
Markus Schöller; William C. Danchi; Françoise Delplancke, Editor(s)