Plane-wave topography can be made to extract an additional wealth of information from a sample by recording not just one image, but an entire sequence of topographs all along the sample's rocking curve. By following the diffracted intensity in one pixel across the entire sequence of images, local rocking curves from very small areas of sample surface can be reconstructed.
Although the required post-processing and numerical analysis is sometimes moderately demanding, the effort is often compensated by very comprehensive information on the sample's local properties. Quantities that become quantitatively measurable in this way include local scattering power, local lattice tilts (crystallite misorientation), and local lattice quality and perfection. Spatial resolution is, in many cases, essentially given by the detector pixel size.
The technique of sequential topography, in combination with appropriate data analysis methods also called rocking curve imaging, constitutes a method of microdiffraction imaging, i.e. a combination of X-ray imaging with X-ray diffractometry.
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