Astronomy at High Angular Resolution

Astronomers have made rapid progress in observing the sky at extremely fine detail, and those gains now feed into nearly every branch of the field. This volume organizes the relevant methods into three families: direct imaging, interferometry, and image reconstruction.

These techniques can be aimed at a wide range of targets, including planets, single stars, binary star systems, and the centers of active galaxies. The angular resolution they reach spans scales from micro-arcseconds up to tens of milli-arcseconds.

Each chapter is written by a specialist in its subject. Topics include adaptive optics, aperture masking, spectral disentangling, lucky imaging, Roche tomography, interferometric imaging, interferometric studies of active galactic nuclei, reverberation mapping of those nuclei, Doppler and magnetic imaging of stellar surfaces, Doppler tomography, eclipse mapping, Stokes imaging, and stellar tomography. The book is intended for researchers entering the field, showing how to reach the finest angular resolution possible at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, from diffraction-limited imaging down to micro-arcsecond scales.