Estimating turbulence in images

Atmospheric turbulence can cause severe blurring and scintillation in images. These distortions result in less detailed images. Using only image enhancement techniques can improve the quality of the images to some extend, but usually not enough to see all details. Turbulence correction techniques, such as post-processing techniques using a deconvolution, are developed and show good results. A more profound understanding of atmospheric turbulence, and especially the impact of turbulence on the image quality, might help to improve the quality of these images even further. To this end, we present a simple method of estimating the shape and size of the point spread function. The method is tested using images from an ongoing trial in South-Africa