Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2016
‘Seeing’ affects the light-curve of a stellar occultation by the Moon in two ways: the diffraction pattern on the ground is smeared out by atmospheric turbulence, and the pattern also suffers random displacements. These effects are analogous to the familiar image blur and image motion, respectively. However, there is a major difference between ordinary astronomical seeing and the effect on the lunar diffraction pattern: the former is the seeing looking up at the sky from the bottom of the atmosphere, but the latter corresponds to the seeing looking down through the atmosphere at the surface of the Earth.
This downward-looking seeing is of concern to people engaged in aerial photography and satellite reconnaissance, and has been studied theoretically from this point of view. It also enters into the theory of stellar scintillation, because the seeing blurs out the scintillation shadow pattern just as it blurs out the occultation diffraction pattern.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.