Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope

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Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope
Cmglee Cambridge MRAO COAST bunker.jpg
The interior of the COAST bunker in June 2014
Alternative namesCOAST OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Location(s)Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, East of England, England
Coordinates 52°09′50″N0°02′28″E / 52.164°N 0.041°E / 52.164; 0.041 OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/ OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
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Location of Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope
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Part of COAST and the exterior of its bunker in June 2014 Cmglee Cambridge MRAO COAST.jpg
Part of COAST and the exterior of its bunker in June 2014

COAST, the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, is a multi-element optical astronomical interferometer with baselines of up to 100 metres, which uses aperture synthesis to observe stars with angular resolution as high as one thousandth of one arcsecond (producing much higher resolution images than individual telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope). The principal limitation is that COAST can only image bright stars.

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COAST was the first long-baseline interferometer to obtain high-resolution images of the surfaces of stars other than Sun (although the surfaces of other stars had previously been imaged at lower resolution using aperture masking interferometry on the William Herschel Telescope).

The COAST array was conceived by John E. Baldwin and is operated by the Cavendish Astrophysics Group. It is situated at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridgeshire, England.

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