I’ve seen talk of using the moon or even telescopes all over the world collectively work as a single telescope.
In: Planetary Science
That’s part of my day job. This is done with radio telescopes using a method called interferometry. The Event Horizon Telescope is really a set of radio telescopes spread around the world. Radio waves are received from a distant source (in this case a black hole at the center of a galaxy) by telescopes around the world. The signals are recorded on very high speed disk drives, mailed to a central location where there’s a computer called a correlator. The individual waveforms of the different signals are aligned with each other to less than a billionth of a second so that the very slight time difference between them can be seen. This allows a curious form of stereo vision to produce an image with very high resolution, like seeing a dime on the moon.
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