Tanya Tavenner, Air Force Research Laboratory, RDSS, Starfire Optical Range; Jack Drummond, Leidos; Mala Mateen,Air Force Research Laboratory, RDSS, Starfire Optical Range; Ethan Wood, Air Force Research Laboratory, RDSS, Starfire Optical Range; Odell Reynolds, Air Force Research Laboratory, RDSS, Starfire Optical Range; Emory Jenkins, AFRL Summer Internship
Keywords: speckle interferometry, adaptive optics, binary stars, geosynchronous satellites, Starfire Optical Range
Abstract:
Speckle interferometry observations of about a dozen binary stars of 5th to 9th magnitude in the I-band (0.9 microns) were made with a 1 m telescope at the Starfire Optical Range on two nights, 2020 Nov 3 and 2021 Feb 23. The binaries had separations ranging from the telescope diffraction limit to more than one arcsec, and included a variety of magnitude differences. Parametric Blind Deconvolution (PBD) is demonstrated to extract orientations, separations, and magnitude differences from the mean FFTs of the centered short exposure images. PBD can also be applied to the mean centered shift-and-add images. While the orientation and separations are relatively easy to measure and can be compared to catalog information, the magnitude differences are not only difficult to determine, they are not readily available from the literature for any particular wavelength. Therefore, we also obtained adaptive optics observations at the same wavelength with a nearby 1.5 m telescope on the second night to provide ground truth. The results from these observations are directly applicable to closely spaced objects (CSO), satellites at geosynchronous distances, all of which are point sources from the ground.
Date of Conference: September 14-17, 2021
Track: Non-Resolved Object Characterization