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CCC comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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Lately I've been wondering about telescope resolving power, and physical limits on the size of features we can see at interstellar distances.
I know about the diffraction limit, which (by my quick and dirty math) seems to imply a telescope on the order of a kilometer in size could resolve objects several meters across, but I imagine it's actually more complicated than that. Does anyone know a good source of information on the topic?
Any introduction to astronomy textbook will help you out. I used BOB.
Instead of having huge individual telescopes which run into issues {How do you keep the mirror clean? What shape do you make it? How do you deal with the atmosphere (Adaptive optics are hard enough for small telescopes)? Constructing a telescope this large in space would be fantastically difficult and expensive.}, you can do interferometry. The largest telescopes these days run into the tens of meters, see E-ELT.