Bino scope long baseline?

Started by kkirksea, 07/11/2003 05:24PM
Posted 07/11/2003 05:24PM Opening Post
Hmmm...

I was reading about CHARA and was wondering...

If you took two 4 inch refractors and separated them by, oh, 12 inches, and then vectored diagonals ( collimatiable, say, William Optics modified with thumb screws ) to make a binoscope...

Would that work and create a scope with the effective resolution of a 16" refractor? ( light gathering, of course, would only be that of a 5.5" or so )
Posted 07/12/2003 01:52AM #1
Karl,

If you could somehow combine these two images so the light wavelengths were in phase, I suppose that would give some of the benefits of a larger effective diameter, but then only in the one dimension, the other dimension would still have only a 4" resolution. However a persons eyes do not have the ability to discern light phase information, but only the intensity of the light, so the added 12" of separation of the two 4" lenses would not add any extra resolution over the 4" all by itself. However the brain has the ability to do some signal processing on the two seperate images and the binocular image will usually look better than a single view through one eye alone.

David Simons
Posted 07/12/2003 03:31AM #2
If you could combine the two light beams,
say with a beam splitter prism or mirror,
and keep the optical paths identical to a
small fraction of a wave, what you would see
is the usual approx 1 arcsecond seeing
disk. But it would also have bright and dark
stripes on it corresponding to about 0.3
arcseconds, which is your 12" resolution.

What can you do with this? Not too much
if you are just looking with the eye.
If you looked at a double star separated by
about the same amount (0.3 arcsec) the stripes
would go away and come back as you rotated
the 12" baseline.

Try puting a mask with two holes in front of
your scope, and see what happens.