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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Observational Approach and Perspective

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Well you did not cover more than half of my planned talk! (laughter). Let me comment on interferometric techniques, in particular speckle imaging which you mentioned. Doing speckle imaging with the largest telescopes now available will not give you better than the theoretical resolving power of the telescope. With a 4m telescope that is about 30 marc sec in the visible. That happens to be the radius of the supergiant Betelguese. So you are not going to achieve much with speckle imaging on these stars. One technique which has not been adequately exploited is that of lunar occultation which can give much better angular resolution than speckle, of the order of 2-3 marc sec. By using suitably chosen filters it may be possible to see structure on the disks of stars.