Turning Earth Into a Telescope | The Terrascope

Cool Worlds · 613.4K views · 2019-08-02 · 29:52

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Overview

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

On Hacker News

HN people point to it as an excellent explanation of using Earth's atmosphere or gravity as a lens in astronomy threads.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysics Space exploration & spaceflight

What people said

usful · 2023-03 · Recommendation
Need many images to superimpose them into a single computed image. David Kipping has a great video on it [VIDEO] We would need a train of probes being sent in a row because there is a limited amount of time they will pass through the focal area.
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spartanatreyu · 2022-11 · Recommendation
You might be interested in this video which talks about using the Earth's gravity to create a telescope with a lens roughly the size of the Earth (a terrascope): [VIDEO] They also have a follow up video about using Jupiter to create a jovoscope and there's also more about creating a telescope using the sun (although since the sensor would need to be so far away from the Sun, we would essentially need to launch a different spaceship for each target that we tried to image).
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TomGullen · 2022-07 · Recommendation
An excellent video on this: [VIDEO] Earths atmosphere and weather affects this sort of telescope IIRC and will filter out some lightwaves but seems like a much easier win
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Sources

Video by Cool Worlds, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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