I can’t wrap my head around this. The light poles are still emiting light individually, so how do they get merged into one single source of light when viewed from space and become visible? It feels logical to me that one light pole should look the same as a hundred thousand since they’re just a repetition of one light pole with each one acting separately.
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You can take a picture of a single bright **atom** in the right condition.
The hard part of seeing a single light pole isn’t having light reach your eye. A few things go into seeing it:
(a) You need sufficient intensity above certain threshold so that your eye will recognize that as significant. Your eye will ignore too weak signal.
(b) You need to distinguish it from other bright objects. If there are other sources of light coming into your eye, there could be enough diffraction that drown out the little amount of light from a light pole.
If you have a single bright atom isolated from everything else, make the room very dark (to solve problem (b)), and use long exposure (to solve problem (a)) you can take a picture of a single bright atom.
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