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Recent observations of stellar scintillation provide new evidence that atmospheric dispersion alone is not sufficient to cause the saturation observed at large zenith angles. Saturation is produced by lateral spreading of the (initially collimated) light in traversing the turbulent atmosphere—a phenomenon called seeing by astronomers, or multiple scattering by optical physicists. The magnitude of this effect, as estimated from stellar scintillation data, agrees well with the minimum resolution predicted by Fried and by Hulett, and is correlated as expected with the strength of scintillation in the zenith.
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A. T. Young (1970) studied this question.
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