English

Image reconstruction with the JWST Interferometer

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-04-17 v2

Abstract

Flying on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) above Earth's turbulent atmosphere, the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) on the NIRISS instrument is the highest-resolution infrared interferometer ever placed in space. However, its performance was found to be limited by non-linear detector systematics, particularly charge migration - or the Brighter-Fatter Effect. Conventional interferometric Fourier observables are degraded by non-linear transformations in the image plane, with the consequence that the inner working angle and contrast limits of AMI were seriously compromised. Building on the end-to-end differentiable model & calibration code amigo, we here present a regularised maximum-likelihood image reconstruction framework dorito which can deconvolve AMI images either in the image plane or from calibrated Fourier observables, achieving high angular resolution and contrast over a wider field of view than conventional interferometric limits. This modular code by default includes regularisation by maximum entropy, and total variation defined with l1l_1 or l2l_2 metrics. We present imaging results from dorito for three benchmark imaging datasets: the volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io, the colliding-wind binary dust nebula WR 137 and the archetypal Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus NGC 1068. In all three cases we recover images consistent with the literature at diffraction-limited resolutions. The performance, limitations, and future opportunities enabled by amigo for AMI imaging (and beyond) are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10924,
  title  = {Image reconstruction with the JWST Interferometer},
  author = {Max Charles and Louis Desdoigts and Benjamin Pope and Peter Tuthill and Dori Blakely and Doug Johnstone and Shrishmoy Ray and K. E. Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan and Anand Sivaramakrishnan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10924},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:32:53.915Z