Yes, I think you\'ve got the details right, so let me clarify my statement about \"more outside the central spot.\"
If you keep the same shape aperture, then as you scale the aperture shape the diffraction pattern scales inversely. Thus, the statement \"brighter tails relative to the central spot\" depends on how you\'re defining what the \"central spot\" means. If you define the \"central spot\" to scale with the size of the diffraction pattern, then there\'s always a constant ratio of the amount in the center (e.g. the main peak of an Airy disk) to the tails. However, if you measure at a fixed radius (e.g., what fraction of the light spills outside a 20pxl radius, vs. how much is inside a few pixel region near the source), you get more of the light far from the source (bigger, more visible diffraction stars) as you stop down --- which causes the visual impact of diffraction beyond central-peak-broadening blur.
Changing from circular to hard-edged polygonal apertures further exacerbates the problem, by concentrating the diffracted light into easy-to-see (and hard-to-correct) spikes slashing across the dark parts of the image.
Apr 02, 2013 at 02:46 PM
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