How do telescopes that are made up of several somethings miles apart work?

372 viewsOtherPlanetary Science

I’ve seen talk of using the moon or even telescopes all over the world collectively work as a single telescope.

In: Planetary Science

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

you need a special type of telescope that measures the wave length and phase of the light as it captures it.

you record the exact wave length and phase and time and exact position at each telescope and you send it all to a supercomputer. the supercomputer calculates how those waves of light would have interfered with each other. Lenses basicaly do the same thing, where the final output is effectivly the interference between the edges of the lense. so your supercomputer essencially calculates what the image taken from a camera would look like if it some how had a lense the diameter of your telescope array.

there are a few downsides to this, mainly huge processing overhead and the need for exact wave properties, position, and time, but also that while the resolution is what a bigger lense would give you, the brightness is limited by the individual telescopes, so you can see more detail, but you cant see any details that were too dim for an individual telescope. VS something like JWST which has a physically bigger lense (ok mirror) and CAN see dimmer things, even if its resolution isnt better than hubble. (it also has a bigger field of view so there is that too)

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