Automated Speckle Interferometry of Known Binaries
Abstract
Astronomers have been measuring the separations and position angles between the two components of binary stars since William Herschel began his observations in 1781. In 1970, Anton Labeyrie pioneered a method, speckle interferometry, that overcomes the usual resolution limits induced by atmospheric turbulence by taking hundreds or thousands of short exposures and reducing them in Fourier space. Our 2022 automation of speckle interferometry allowed us to use a fully robotic 1.0-meter PlaneWave Instruments telescope, located at the El Sauce Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile, to obtain observations of many known binaries with established orbits. The long-term objective of these observations is to establish the precision, accuracy, and limitations of this telescope's automated speckle interferometry measurements. This paper provides an early overview of the Known Binaries Project and provide example results on a small-separation (0.27") binary, WDS 12274-2843 B 228.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.15011,
title = {Automated Speckle Interferometry of Known Binaries},
author = {Nick Hardy and Leon Bewersdorff and David Rowe and Russell Genet and Rick Wasson and James Armstrong and Scott Dixon and Mark Harris and Tom Smith and Rachel Freed and Paul McCudden and S. Stephen Rajkumar Inbanathan and Marie Davis and Christopher Giavarini and Ronald Snyder and Roger Wholly and Maaike Calvin and Sumner Cotton and Julia Carter and Mario Terrazas and Shane Christopher R. and Arun Kumar A. and Sithara Naskath H. and Mariam Ronald Rabin A},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15011},
year = {2023}
}