Electrooptical processing for radio astronomy

A recent report of the first computer-generated radio-derived photographs of the Whirlpool Galaxy will no doubt provide impetus for additional radio photography of astronomical events. Electro-optical techniques, developed in the past decade for obtaining high resolution range, range-rate, and angular target data with array radars, may be highly suitable for generating visible images of astronomical events. The electrooptical processor can furnish continuously and unambiguously, in the form of an optical image, the distribution of radio emission present in the entire effective scan sector of an array without the necessity of electronic steering.