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Semiconductor Telescope

A

Arthur Hanson

Well-known member
Lockheed Martin shrinks the telescope

This could change our entire way we view optics in the future by taking lenses and focal lengths to flat panel mems for lenses and sensors. This is already done to a great extent by cell phone cameras, this just puts this technology on steroids. Soon we could cell phone have binocular and telescope functions be built in or an add on. This could soon be an add on to everything from a bicycle with a cell phone mount to cars, ships and aircraft. It could even be built into glasses, maybe even a medical implant for the eye. This technology as all tech will get better, cheaper, smaller and more versatile. Many other functions could be added with temperature, range and spectrograph functions added among others. This is but one example we will see semiconductor fabrication technologies applied to. Really in the grand scheme of things, semiconductor/mems technology is still in their infancy.
 
Great find Arthur! At first read I thought "that can't be right - surely you lose resolution?". But of course resolution isn't determined just by the size of individual elements - it's determined also by separation between elements, which is how the Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Array radio telescopes work. Interesting to see the same principle applied at optical wavelengths!
 
I wonder how similar this technology is to the already commercially available Lytro Illum camera. It allow you to take a picture and choose the focal point(s) later. It uses a sensor array and seems to use some phase or angle information to regenerate an image from the individual light sensors.
 
Maybe quite similar, with a different goal. I have always looked at these methods as a way to increase resolution. The Event Horizon Telescope aims to combine data from radio telescopes in California, Hawaii, Arizona, Mexico, Chile, Spain, France, Greenland and Antarctica to image the black-hole (Sgr A*) at the center of our galaxy. In this case the aperture is effectively the diameter of the earth! There are even more ambitious (and longer term) goals to place an array of telescopes in space separated by ~millions of km, with corresponding aperture, for exoplanet imaging.Keeping these things aligned and synchronized will be an interesting challenge :)
 
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