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Old 17-11-2013, 10:34 AM
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alpal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz View Post
Stars are not wavefunctions - they are just so far away that they are point sources with no effective angular extent.

Diffraction rings come about when the scope is in focus, but cannot turn a plane wavefront into a true point in the focal plane and you end up with an Airy pattern. that is the closest a scope can get to representing the point nature of far off stars and it is just an approximation to what is really there. We all seem to accept that it is natural for stars to be round blobs of varying sizes, even though that situation is actually a flawed representation determined by the shortcomings of our imaging systems and conditions.

I would say that star light is very much a wave function.
The star light is creating Fourier components.
This thread is all about spot sizes & a manufacturer claiming
that their spot size is 8 times smaller than an RC.
We can only ever represent a star as a spot of a certain size.
Given "perfect" seeing we would all like that.
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