Stellar scintillation technique for the measurement of tilt anisoplanatism

Abstract

The significance of tilt anisoplanatism is established, and a measurement theory, based on aperture-averaging intensity scintillation, is developed. The theory is a direct extention of the technique currently used to determine the isoplanatic angle as defined by Fried [J. Opt. Soc. am. 72, 52 (1982)]. By using this theory, a physically realizable binary aperture-weighting function is derived for a particular case of interest. It is noted that direct quantitative measurements of tilt anisoplanatism can also be made, under specific circumstances, by tracking the relative centroid motion of a binary star pair. Thus independent verification of the remote-sensing theory for tilt anisoplanatism, based on aperture-averaging scintillation measurements, should be possible.