A number of experiments have been realized by several researchers to understand and analyze the mirror seeing phenomenon. These tests have been performed with different methods and quantities measured also differed. Perhaps for this reason the various data have never been generalized toward the obtention of engineering parameterizations reliably applicable to an actual telescope design.
Therefore this will be the purpose of the present section: we will briefly describe the main experiments and reduce the measured quantities to a common unit of measure. Then in the next section the test results will be compared to those of similarity and computation models in order to provide a useful theory for understanding and controlling the mirror seeing phenomenon in telescopes.