Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope
COAST, the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, is a multi-element optical astronomical interferometer with baselines of up to 100 metres, which uses aperture synthesis to observe stars with angular resolution as high as one thousandth of one arcsecond. The principal limitation is that COAST can only image bright stars. COAST was the first long-baseline interferometer to obtain high-resolution images of the surfaces of stars other than our sun.
The COAST array was conceived by John E. Baldwin, and is operated by the Cavendish Astrophysics Group. It is situated at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridgeshire, England.
