Spatial stabilization of deep-turbulence-induced anisoplanatic blur

We explore the feasibility of post-detection restoration when imaging through deep turbulence characterized by extreme anisoplanatism. A wave-optics code was used to simulate relevant short-exposure point spread functions (PSFs) and their decorrelation as a function of point-source separation was computed. In addition, short-exposure images of minimally extended objects were simulated and shown to retain a central lobe that is clearly narrower than the long-exposure counterpart. This suggests that short-exposure image data are more informative than long-exposure data, even in the presence of extreme anisoplanatism. The implications of these findings for image restoration from a sequence of short-exposure images are discussed.