Wide-area imaging through the atmosphere

Wave-front distortion introduced as light passes through the atmosphere results in short exposure images which exhibit random warping amongst other effects. Our aim is to remove the warping to restore images to their true geometry, but this is not easy as the true geometry is generally not known. To do so, we need to understand the effect of atmospheric turbulence on short exposure images. The individual images are corrected and summed to produce a final image, which therefore has local motion blur removed and can approach the theoretical resolution limit of our optical/imaging system. An important by-product of the process is a sequence of detailed shift maps which provide, in effect, a visualization of the instantaneous turbulence field.