Abstract
Although most atmospheric image degradation is commonly attributed to ray path fluctuations resulting from turbulence, Lutomirski has predicted recently that, for large scattering path lengths, significant Image degradation can be caused also by ray path fluctuations resulting from fluctuations in aerosol scatter of the object beam.1 His expression for aerosol MTF predicts a wavelength dependence for spherical waves given by for fr < a/(fl/λ), where fr is spatial frequency, fl is optic focal length, Sa is the aerosol scattering coefficient, λ is wavelength, a is aerosol radius, and z is path length. Since the scattering coefficient is generally proportional to λ−n, Lutomirski predicts that for n < 2 the aerosol MTF should favor imaging at shorter wavelengths, as opposed to turbulence theory, which predicts resolution improvement at longer wavelengths.
© 1981 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Philip L. Walker
WW2 OSA Annual Meeting (FIO) 1988
Jean-Luc Parpal, Jean-Pierre Monchalin, Lionel Bertrand, and Jean-Marie Gagne
TuA12 Photoacoustic Spectroscopy (PAS) 1981
JIAN WU, JUNBO WANG, and XUECHENG QUAN
WM4 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1985