Optical Resolution - Atmospheric Resolution

Atmospheric Resolution

Systems looking through long atmospheric paths may be limited by turbulence. A key measure of the quality of atmospheric turbulence is the seeing diameter, also known as Fried's seeing diameter. A path which is temporally coherent is known as an isoplanatic patch.

Large apertures may suffer from aperture averaging, the result of several paths being integrated into one image.

Turbulence scales with wavelength at approximately a 6/5 power. Thus, seeing is better at infrared wavelengths than at visible wavelengths.

Short exposures suffer from turbulence less than longer exposures due to the "inner" and "outer" scale turbulence; short is considered to be much less than 10 ms for visible imaging (typically, anything less than 2 ms). Inner scale turbulence arises due to the eddies in the turbulent flow, while outer scale turbulence arises from large air mass flow. These masses typically move slowly, and so are reduced by decreasing the integration period.

A system limited only by the quality of the optics is said to be diffraction-limited. However, since atmospheric turbulence is normally the limiting factor for visible systems looking through long atmospheric paths, most systems are turbulence-limited. Corrections can be made by using adaptive optics or post-processing techniques.

where

is the spatial frequency

is the wavelength

f is the focal length

D is the aperture diameter

b is a constant (1 for far-field propagation)

and is Fried's seeing diameter