  Aperture synthesis techniques are increasingly being employed to provide high
angular resolution images in situations where the object of interest is in the
near field of the interferometric array. Previous work has showed that an
aperture synthesis array can be refocused on an object in the near field of an
array, provided that the object is smaller than the effective Fresnel zone size
corresponding to the array-object range. We show here that, under paraxial
conditions, standard interferometric techniques can be used to image objects
which are substantially larger than this limit. We also note that
interferometric self-calibration and phase-closure image reconstruction
techniques can be used to achieve near-field refocussing without requiring
accurate object range information. We use our results to show that the field of
view for high-resolution aperture synthesis imaging of geosynchronous
satellites from the ground can be considerably larger than the largest
satellites in Earth orbit.
