Radio Interferometry
The Very Large Array
(VLA): 27 dishes are combined to simulate a large dish of 36 km in
diameter.
Just as for optical telescopes, the resolving power of a radio telescope depends on the diameter of the objective lens or
mirror amin = 1.22 l/D.
For radio telescopes, this is a big problem: Radio waves are much longer than visible
light
® Use
interferometry to improve resolution!
