Palomar Testbed Interferometer

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The Palomar Testbed Interferometer is a near-IR, long-baseline stellar interferometer located at Palomar Observatory in north San Diego County. It was built by Caltech/JPL and is intended to serve as a testbed for developing interferometric techniques to be used at the Keck Interferometer. It began operations in 1995 and acheieved routine operations in 1998, producing more than 35 refereed papers in a variety of scientific journals covering topics from high precision astrometry to stellar masses, stellar diameters and shapes.

PTI is notable for being equipped with a "dual-star" system, making it possible to simultaneously observe pairs of stars; this cancels some of the atmospheric effects of astronomical seeing and makes very high precision measurements possible.

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