Atmospheric turbulence and the resolution limits of large ground-based telescopes: comment

The paper by McKechnie [ J. Opt. Soc. Am. A9, 1937 ( 1992)] is discussed, in which McKechnie tries to explain astronomers’ visual descriptions of bright cores in star images by using his own model of atmospheric inhomogeneities, which is different from the conventional turbulent model. In this Communication we show that the star images presented by McKechnie are consistent with the traditional turbulent model. The McKechnie model of scattering, a single-scale atmosphere with the characteristic scale L0 ≃ 35 cm, contradicts all our experiences with turbulence: both direct in situ measurements of turbulent characteristics and indirect experiments of wave propagation in a turbulent atmosphere.