Using spatial models as priors in astronomical image analysis

Optical astronomers now normally collect digital images by means of charge-coupled device detectors, which are blurred by atmospheric motion and distorted by physical noise in the detection process. We examine Bayesian procedures to clean such images using explicit models from spatial statistics for the underlying structure, and compare these methods with those based on maximum entropy. This is an undated version of Molina and Ripley (1989) containing brief details of later work. Sections 1–5, 7 and 8 follow that paper and describe the deconvolution of galaxies. Further examples have been published in Molina et al. (1992a) for an astronomical audience. Work on the deconvolution of planetary images from Molina et al. (1992b, c) is reported in Section 6 with examples included in Section 7.