Visualization of turbulence and motion-blur removal in wide-area imaging through the atmosphere

Abstract

We explore the feasibility of a new technique for visualization of the effects of turbulence in clear air [1]-[2], [4]-[5], based on some earlier ideas [10]. Sequences of short exposure images of a scene, such as the surface of the moon or a horizontally imaged scene on the earth, are captured using a 0.4 m diameter optical telescope. The field of view, typically 100 arc secs across, is wide compared to that of most astronomical observations [6]-[8], so that the main effect observed is a random “wobbling” within each image. With an exposure time of between 5 and 10 ms, the atmospheric wobble is “frozen” to provide a sequence of randomly warped images. The point spread function (PSF) for each image, due to the atmosphere and telescope, approximates a position-dependent randomly-displaced delta function (if we temporarily ignore instantaneous speckle and instrument blurring).