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The Power of Optical/IR Interferometry: Recent Scientific Results and 2nd Generation Instrumentation
Celebrating the completion of the first phase of VLTI development, the ESO workshop The Power of Optical/IR Interferometry, held in 2005, gathered researchers together to review and discuss not just interferometers, but also how science uses interferometers and their impact on astronomy as a whole. This volume contains the proceedings of this workshop, serving as a reference for astronomers working with optical and infrared interferometry.
Scientific Drivers for ESO Future VLT/VLTI Instrumentation
This is the start of a long process to ultimately operate new advanced capabilities at Paranal that can keep up with the evergrowing need for larger and more complex astrophysical data sets. A modern instrument represents a very significant investment in cash, human resources and time. Such a meeting gives us a precious yardstick to evaluate the competitiveness of 1st-generation instruments and associated current and forthcoming proposals for 1st-generation upgrades. This is also crucial to orient the large research and development effort that will provide the very foundation on which 2nd-generation VLT instrumentation can be built. Finally, it represents a significant step towards defining the hopes and goals for the future Extremely Large Telescope to come. The first outcome of this meeting, already in progress, is outlined in the epilogue.
Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics for Astronomy
Adaptive optics allows the theoretical limit of angular resolution to be achieved from a large telescope, despite the presence of turbulence. Thus an eight meter class telescope, such as one of the four in the Very Large Telescope operated by ESO in Chile, will in future be routinely capable of an angular resolution of almost 0.01 arcsec, compared tot he present resolution of about 0.5 arcsec for conventional imaging in good condition. All the world's major telescopes either have adaptive optics or are in the process of building AO systems. It turns out that a reasonable fraction of the sky can be observed using adaptive optics, with moderately good imaging quality, provided imaging in done ...
The Effects of Atmospheric Calibration Errors on Source Model Parameters
Optical long-baseline interferometric data is commonly calibrated with respect to an external calibrator, which is either an unresolved source or a star with a known angular diameter. A typical observational strategy involves acquiring data in a sequence of calibrator-target pairs, where the observation of each source is obtained separately. Therefore, the atmospheric variations that have time scales shorter than the cadence between the target-calibrator pairs are not always fully removed from the data even after calibration. This results in calibrated observations of a target star that contain unknown quantities of residual atmospheric variations. We describe how Monte Carlo simulations can be used to assess quantitatively the impact of atmospheric variations on fitted model parameters, such as angular diameters of uniform-disk models representing semi- and fully-resolved single stars.
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Astronomy’s Quest for Sharp Images
Since the 1960s, astrophysical discoveries have blossomed, due to the emergence of powerful and new observational tools. Among them, a fantastic improvement of the sharpness of astronomical images, obtained with ground based optical telescopes, has been the result of two revolutions: adaptive optics and optical interferometry. Written for a general audience, interwoven with fascinating details about the evolution of vision and optics, this book tells a personal story of these revolutions in observational astronomy, born two centuries ago and blossoming in the past fifty years. With the construction of the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Europe played a leading role where young scientists, joining creative astronomers and engineers, have developed a superb creativity. Today, incredibly sharp images of exoplanetary systems and black hole environments are obtained and reveal new questions about Earth-like objects or fundamental physics. The author has been one of the actors of this adventure. His first-hand testimony is opening the future to new horizons.
