Quote:
Originally Posted by sil
For years I'm sure most of you have heard of projects to use radio telescopes (and more recently Optical telescope) spread across say 100km wide area to give the imaging power of a virtual 100km telescope.
Apart from using magic to join the data meaningfully. How well does this really work and the obvious question is why aren't people doing this from home? Many of us has multiple scopes and I know many have dual mounted scopes (side by side) so why arent people for example using their ED80 +ED120 side by side to get images from a virtual ED300? Surely the algorithms to combine data are published and someone has knocked up a tool to handle combining the data? Plenty of people are out there with the gear to image side by side? If these massive telescope array projects can give science so much more than surely and two consumer scopes can get the hobbyist better images than any single one?
Or am I too brain damaged to see whats wrong with this question/idea?  |
No not brain damaged but unfortunately it doesn't work easily with optical frequencies.
What you are talking about is called "synthesis imaging" that relies on combining the signal (or light) from separate telescopes and creating an interference pattern. This requires combining the same wave front from 2 separate scopes. This can be done with radio frequencies relatively easily when the wavelengths are ~20cm but is very hard with light when you have a wavelength of a few nanometers.