THE REAL STAR WARS PROGRAM.

Henry Kline
Senior Producer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Gerry Gilmore (gil@ast.cam.ac.uk)

Sent: Star wars project, which no doubt involves some of your objects.

Thu 1/18/07 3:37 AM
To:
john lenard (santamonicajohn@hotmail.com)

Hello again, and again my congratulations on your superb astrophotography.

You are clearly getting some images at almost the diffraction limit of your telescope. In the very sharpest images there are hints of diffraction rings visible on the edges of the satellites. That is of course the absolute limit of optical performance, and is only rarely attained.

Interestingly, the process you have, of using a high-quality imaging system, with fast read-out, and then selecting the rare `perfect’ images is something which has been developed and applied somewhat by one of my colleagues here. You might like to look at our local web page presenting some of this: [link to http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/

You might also be interested in a journal produced by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory – which is the group which has built some of the things you are seeing. Much of what they do is what used to be the Star wars project, which no doubt involves some of your objects. They
don’t talk about the military satellites, of course, but there are many dicussions of earth surveillance, and related issues. It is distributed only to academic organisations, so you may need to get your local library to borrow it, but you may be able to get this (for free) from

Subscription Coordinator
Room L-054
Lincoln Laboratory
MIT
244 Wood Street
Lexington
MA 0240-9185
USA
Gerry Gilmore FInstP ScD
Professor of Experimental Philosophy