Talk:Astronomical interferometer

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[edit] Reading a license plate on an extrasolar planet?

Could someone discuss the technical requirements of making a Really Good Telescope - i.e. one that can be used to view fine detail of life around another star? My untutored logic finds that if the angular resolution is approximately 1.220 lambda/D arc seconds (so the Hubble Space Telescope gets 0.05 arcseconds for a 2.5 meter mirror for example), with 4.85 x 10E-6 radians per arcsecond, the Hubble should resolve one astronomical unit at 30 light years. But there are 149,597,870,691 meters in an astronomical unit, so it should take roughly a 30 km mirror (spacing) to resolve opposite ends of a planet. As far as I know the largest that the mirrors can be spaced is the orbit of Neptune (since it clears a path in its orbit), 60 AU apart. This gives roughly a 0.5 inch resolving power, which might be good enough to read a license plate depending on how tall the aliens are. ;) But how large each mirror needs to be is another question, as is how many you need to be able to point the array at a fair proportion of extrasolar planets. Of course, all this is "WP:original research" and not a very good example of that, but I wanted to clarify what I'd hope to see an expert try to illustrate for the article. Wnt (talk) 17:56, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] How? Why?

How does an interferometer provide better resolution than a single telescope? Are we allowed to have a single sentence explanation in the introduction of this article?

In the drawing of two telescopes side by side there is no explanation of what the two setups provide beyond a single telescope. Why an interferometer? I imagine some utility such as parallax estimations of distances or various other possibilities but why doesn't the article say it? Rtdrury (talk) 08:49, 13 March 2008 (UTC)