Abstract

The US Air Force (USAF) conducts research involving the sensing and compensation of atmospheric turbulence, which acts to blur images and make laser-beam propagation more challenging. As such, USAF scientists and engineers (S&Es) often face the challenging task of explaining this research to audiences without relevant technical expertise. These audiences vary widely all the way from upper military leadership down to K-12 students as part of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach activities. Previously, a team of USAF S&Es developed a table-top setup for the demonstration of digital-holography (DH) technology. This technology enables the measurement of the complex-optical field, which in turn enables a plethora of applications that involve imaging and wavefront sensing. Therefore, in this paper we extend this table-top setup to illustrate both the effects of atmospheric turbulence on the imaging and wavefront sensing process and the digital-signal processing required to estimate and mitigate these effects. The enhanced demonstration provides a visual-learning aid to help explain the complicated concepts associated with imaging through atmospheric turbulence. Specifically, we show that we can introduce aberrations into the DH system and use digital-image correction to refocus the resultant blurry images. This paper discusses the overall system design, improvements, and lessons learned.

© 2019 SPIE, ICO, IEEE, OSA