For those who didn't attend the meeting last night, the speaker, Steph
Sallum, described the use of aperture masks to improve resolution of objects
with extreme differences in brightness. Her team used the Large Binocular
Telescope, but "stopped it down" to 10% of the collecting area with six
small holes, creating a sort of optical interferometer. This is all very
counterintuitive to me, and the Wikipedia article only sort of cleared
things up.
Steph's 2015 paper on the star T Cha is available from the ADS Abstract
service. She is the first author in an Astrophysical Journal paper, so
obviously she's no schmuck.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015ApJ...801...85S
She said that the classic paper describing the NRM technique is from 2000,
which must be this one. It describes masking the *secondary* mirror of the
10m Keck telescope. Much like the masks allowing 10% of the light to the
detector, I understood roughly 10% of this paper.
http://ukads.nottingham.ac.uk/abs/2000PASP..112..555T
The technique was around well before the year 2000. Here's an paper from
way back in 1988 that describes the theory and some results from the Hale 5m
telescope.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1988ESOC...29..595K
Tom
