Who developed the 'aperture synthesis' method of radio astronomy?
Aperture synthesis stars in the Northern Hemisphere. Some instruments use artificial rotation of the interferometer array instead of Earth rotation, such as in aperture masking interferometry. Aperture synthesis imaging was first developed at radio wavelengths by Martin Ryle and coworkers from the Radio Astronomy Group at Cambridge University. Martin Ryle and Tony Hewish jointly received a Nobel Prize for this and other contributions to the development of radio interferometry. The radio astronomy group in Cambridge went on to found the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge in the 1950s. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as computers (such as the Titan)
Aperture synthesis Aperture synthesis Aperture synthesis or synthesis imaging is a type of interferometry that mixes signals from a collection of telescopes to produce images having the same angular resolution as an instrument the size of the entire collection. At each separation and orientation, the lobe-pattern of the interferometer produces an output which is one component of the Fourier transform of the spatial distribution of the brightness of the observed object. The image (or "map") of the source is produced from these measurements. Astronomical interferometers are commonly used for high-resolution optical, infrared, submillimetre and radio astronomy observations. Aperture synthesis is possible only