A conventional non-redundant aperture mask buys clean interferometric observables by blocking more than 85 percent of a telescope pupil, which confines the technique to bright targets. Jewel Optics remove that trade by tiling the whole pupil with several interleaved sub-aperture sets, each of which is separately non-redundant, and assigning each set its own phase wedge so it lands as a distinct interferogram on a different part of the detector. The tilings are found by a direct binary search over a hexagonal close-packed grid that swaps sub-apertures between sets and keeps a swap when the number of redundant baselines falls; 14 designs are reported, including ones for the LBT and GMT pupils. Throughput rises roughly by the number of interferograms N (measured 54 percent for a two-wedge MgF2 prototype, 3.1 times a single mask; 69 percent projected for a seven-pattern version), read-noise-limited SNR rises as the square root of N, and Fourier coverage improves because many spatial frequencies are sampled several times at once. The optic is built as a stack of perforated wedged windows, so ceil(log2(N)) windows suffice, keeping it inside a filter-wheel slot as a drop-in component that needs no observatory infrastructure change. A prototype for Subaru/VAMPIRES matches its simulated interferograms and power spectra, and a two-material wedge (SiO2 plus CaF2) is shown in simulation to cut chromatic dispersion by a factor of 150, the achromatic-doublet analogue needed at ELT scale.
The enduring technique of aperture masking interferometry, now more than 150 years old, is still widely practised today for it opens a window of high angular resolution astronomy that remains difficu…