The first diluted telescope ever built in the world

摘要

We have built at the Haute-Provence observatory (France) the rst diluted telescope in the world. We describethis prototype called Carlina, made of three 25 cm mirrors separated by a maximum baseline of 10.5 m. Thethree mirrors in place are already coherenced and rst light is scheduled for June-July 2012. In this article, wewill mainly describe the focal gondola. We propose to build in the near future a 100 m aperture Large DilutedTelescope. This diluted telescope will be more sensitive than regular interferometers (Keck, VLTI, etc.), withhigher imaging capabilities. A LDT will open new elds of research in astrophysics thanks to very high angularresolution imaging of the surface of supergiant stars, AGN, gravitational micro-lens systems, exo-planets, etc.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.