Imaging Atmospheric Turbulence, Using Entropy to Quantify Turbulence Strength

Vertical profile of turbulence strength (C-n(2)) is one of the most important attributes for evaluating a site's astronomical performances. Although seeing is commonly used for describing turbulence strength, it can only represent the integral of all layers of the turbulence above the observer. Other techniques which can be applied to produce C-n(2), such as DIMM-MASS, SCIDAR, etc., all rely on rather complex systems to do the measurements. In this paper, we present an idea to evaluate the relative strength of turbulence with entropies of short exposure images taken at different conjugated heights of the turbulence. Initial experimental results are also presented in the paper.