Interferometric imaging tests for the Large Binocular Telescope^*

Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, I-50125 Firenze, Italy

Send offprint request to: S. Correia e-mail: correia@arcetri.astro.it

Received: 5 July 1999
Accepted: 15 August 1999

Abstract


We present an experiment of interferometric imaging for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), conducted at the 1.5 m TIRGO infrared telescope. The raw data were produced by simulating the LBT pupil with a mask on the secondary mirror. Two different conditions of , where is the single aperture diameter and the Fried parameter, were simulated by the choice of ; field rotation was simulated by rotating the mask. The data set collected consists of several sequences of short exposure interferograms of one point-like and one binary star in the J-band, for two different conditions. We show preliminary results, in particular concerning the fringe contrast loss with integration time. The ability of a Lucy-Richardson-based deconvolution algorithm to reconstruct an object from a set of LBT-like interferometric real data was demonstrated on the binary star  Leo. The retrieved binary parameter values are compared to catalog values, and a good astrometric agreement is found. Photometric and resolution limitations are also discussed. In a first part, the reconstruction method and preliminary numerical simulations of LBT image restoration using this method are presented.