CAMK Annual Conference
Ricardo Salinas (CAMK/Araucaria, Warsaw)
While adaptive optics is the most widespread method to compensate for atmospheric turbulence, these methods are particularly difficult to implement in the optical regime given the technical challenges imposed by the short coherence times. An alternative to reach the diffraction limit of an optical telescope is provided by speckle interferometry, where, instead of real-time corrections, observations are obtained in timescales similar to the coherence time (a few ms), and the diffraction limit is recovered via a post-hoc reduction in Fourier space. In 2019, the Gemini telescopes commissioned two speckle interferometers, Zorro and 'Alopeke, owned by NASA Ames, which have remained as "permanent visiting" instruments since then. In this talk I will present the characteristics of these instruments, to then present a number of science cases where these instruments are particularly suited, mostly leaning to my own research on RR Lyrae in binary systems, and blue stragglers in hierarchical triplets.
