FWIW, there's an article on adaptive optics in the 21 April 2000 Science. One of the figures (on p. 455) is a set of pictures of Seasat taken by the 3.5-meter telescope at the Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico at a range of about 1000 km. Without adaptive compensation, the image is blur; with the AO system turned on, the image is a recognizable picture of Seasat showing all the major structures, including the scatterometer booms; and with unspecified postprocessing the resolution improves to some 25 cm. The wavelength used was 800 nm, so it wasn't quite a visual observation, but it was pretty close. While the US has been doing satellite imaging with adaptive optics for almost two decades, satellite images are almost never released. In fact, I can only think of one, of the Shuttle, that appeared in Aviation Week years ago. I'll fire up my scanner and, if the results are acceptable, forward the Seasat images to Bart as candidates for inclusion in http://www2.satellite.eu.org/telescope.html . ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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