COAST, the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, is a multi-element optical astronomical interferometer with baselines of up to 100 metres, which uses aperture synthesis to observe stars with angular resolution as high as one thousandth of one arcsecond (producing images with much higher resolution than can be obtained using individual telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope). The principal limitation is that COAST can only image bright stars. COAST was the first long-baseline interferometer to obtain high-resolution images of the surfaces of stars other than our sun (although the surfaces of other stars had previously been imaged at lower resolution using Aperture Masking Interferometry on the William Herschel Telescope).
The COAST array was conceived by John E. Baldwin, and is operated by the Cavendish Astrophysics Group. It is situated at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridgeshire, England.
Famous quotes containing the words cambridge, optical, aperture, synthesis and/or telescope:
“For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile.”
—Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders’ sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away ... is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)