Friday, 3 February 2012

What limits the usable focal length of telescopes currently?

Comparing telescopes that observe the visible spectrum to the radio spectrum, radio astronomers have been able to create telescopes with apertures of the order of kms, thanks to aperture synthesis. This is extremely hard in optical telescopes and the only telescope (afaik) that does so is the Large Binocular Telescope. The reason this is possible in radio astronomy is because we can measure the phase of the incoming wave using radio telescopes where as information about the phase is not captured by optical telescopes. Maybe in the future, technology will help us make optical detectors that can measure the phase of the wave.



coming to the size of the aperture itself, larger and larger sizes doesn't help as long as we don't account for the atmospheric seeing. the reason stars twinkle is because of atmospheric seeing. effects seeing can be negated using adaptive and active optics and advancement of these technologies will help astronomy move ahead.



coming to the actual detectors, the intrinsic noise from radio detectors (eg. bolometers) is much smaller than that in optical detectors (eg. CCDs). so again, maybe in the future, we have better detectors with extremely low noise.



(sorry coulnd't add more links. needed more rep :D)

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