A New-Speckle Interferometry System for the MAMA Detector

We have developed a new system for making speckle observations with the multianode microchannel array (MAMA) detector. This system is a true photon-counting imaging device which records the arrival time of every detected photon and allows for reconstruction of image features near the diffraction limit of the telescope. We present a description of the system and summary of observational results obtained at the Lick Observatory 1-m reflector in 1991 September. The diffraction limit of the 1-m telescope at 5029 Å is about 0.125 arcsec and we have successfully resolved the catalogued interferometric binary HD 202582 with a separation of 0.157 ± 0.031 arcsec. A pair of stars in the open cluster ÷ Persei separated by 2.65 ± 0.22 arcsec with approximate V magnitudes 8.6 and 11.5 has also been successfully analyzed with the speckle technique.