Hi,

In the (10th?) chapter about twinkling stars, it is said that Antares was the first star to be resolved by very short exposures of seeing images. I remember it being Betelgeuse, though, from around 1974, done at Kitt Peak and reported in Time magazine...

Ronny

(Er, make that 1974 +/- 2 above [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img])

Refs:
Bonneau & Labeyrie 1973, ApJ 181, L1
Lynds, Worden & Harvey 1976, ApJ 207, 174

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: OhioRonny on 2002-10-09 23:44 ]</font>

Actually, digging through the second reference you gave yielded some earlier results. The Gezari reference from 1972 had several stars resolved, and it looks like measurements were made as early as 1931 for Antares!

I am not sure if I can find which star was resolved first. Maybe I'll call Gezari; I used to work with him. ALso, I don't know where I found the Antares reference for the book; I thought it was Betelgeuse too, but then discovered Antares was done before it.

Concerning imaging of speckles, then nothing was possible before Labeyrie's first paper in 1970 when he first invented this method! Therefore, with this method, Betelgeuse WAS the first star to be photographed as a non-spherical object. Certainly angular sizes of stars were measured before (even in the 1920s) but none was actually photographed as such. Indeed, the BA book describes (in chapter 9) the speckle method very well (combining hundreds of images each 1/10,000 sec long) and the first star to be thus photographed was no other than Betelgeuse. It really made a BIG impression on me in 1976...

Ronny