[time-nuts] Result of Earth Quake speeds up earth?

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 18:31:08 UTC 2011


On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:

> Your pointing accuracy is Y/X, or something close to that.

That describes perfectly when radio can beat optics.   The angular
resolution of the system is the aperture size over the wavelength.
So you can see that a radio telescope must be on other 1000 times
wider then an optical telescope if both are to have the same
resolution.

On an amateur budget optics wins because while one can afford a 12"
diameter optical telescope a 1000 foot baseline antenna array will not
fit in the typical back yard.

optical scopes have a limited maximum size.  Currently this as roughly
about 10 meters in diameter but technology exists to build a radio
antenna array that is one Earth diameter wide.   So radio wins if you
have a government or university sized budget

But optics is catching up and there are now wide optical arrays but
the technology to combine light from multiple scopes in phase is
expensive and depends on precision mechanical devices, long tunnels
and so on. The Charra Array here in LA on Mt. Wilson was designed with
the goal of imaging flares and spots on stars.

There have been proposals to fly a wide baseline optical system in
space, such a system could in theory see continents and oceans on
planets around other stars but realistically the technology is not yet
there. so that will have to wait for the 2nd half of this century.



-- 
=====
Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California




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