Optical long-baseline interferometry in astronomy

Optical long-baseline interferometry can yield images and spectra with fascinating angular resolution. For example, at a wavelength of 500 nm and with a baseline of lOOm a resolution of 10 arcsec can be obtained. We have studied the dependence of the SNR in the reconstructed image on the diluted pupil function, on wavefront aberrations and on photon noise in the interferograms.