What if the autocorrelation is bigger than the cable?

Consider the case where the cable is much shorter than the spatial autocorrelation of the diffractor. This would appear to be a troublesome case. We may notice from the Shell gather in Figure 1 that a limited range of offsets could allow us to see all offsets because of the presence of the scatterers at all ranges. If, however, we measure an autocorrelation over a small range, could spectral factorization possibly construct a minimum phase wavelet over a large range? I fear not. On the other hand, we can enlarge the aperture of a single shot by the idea of synthetic aperture. Let us see how this might be done.