Turning Earth Into a Telescope | The Terrascope
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people point to it as an excellent explanation of using Earth's atmosphere or gravity as a lens in astronomy threads.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends vlasev · 2020-07 · on “When Hubble stared at nothing for 100 hours (2015)”
You can pretty much make a telescope as large as you'd like, depending on your technological level. Hypothetically, you can use gravitational lensing to make a telescope via the sun! It's rather unfeasible at our current level of rocketry, but in time, maybe! Article: [LINK] You can also use Earth's atmosphere as a lens too! It's an amazing video: [this video] Going even crazier, I can imagine we could some day use a massive black hole as a giant telescope.
Recommends TomGullen · 2021-11 · on “Astronomers want NASA to build a giant space telescope to peer at alien Earths”
I love the idea of using gravitational lensing of the sun from a lagrange point around Jupiter. IIRC it theoretically could image an earth like planet in the region of 1000px x 1000px so you could see continents and weather systems - perhaps even light from large cities. I watched a great "Cool Worlds" video as well that said you could do similar with atmospheric lensing of the earth from a lagrange point near the moon (although it would filter out some visible light wavelengths and be weather dependant) - but potentially a much cheaper mission: [this video] This would be going full circle in terms of telescope technology, we started with lenses, moved to mirrors and now back to lenses! To me the
Recommends TomGullen · 2022-07 · on “Mission to reach and operate at the focal region of the solar gravitational lens”
An excellent video on this: [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
Recommends spartanatreyu · 2022-11 · on “First active chemistry on an exoplanet revealed by Webb telescope”
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): [this 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).
Recommends usful · 2023-03 · on “”
Need many images to superimpose them into a single computed image. David Kipping has a great video on it [this 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.
Cites autokad · 2020-04 · on “Extremely Large Telescope”
personally, hearing this makes me happy, can't wait till it's built. Has anyone heard of terrascopes? (telescopes using celestial bodies) [this video] if it is workable, it sounds fantastical but probably not something I'd see in my lifetime either way
Cites northwest_nfts · 2021-10 · on “Which stars can see Earth as a transiting exoplanet?”
Yeah, that sounds similar to the idea of the Terrascope. I think the positioning of drones for the sun might be so wide to be infeasible for the next century. (Like, the drones would have to be in the Kuiper belt) I haven't watched this YT video recently, but I think he also touches on a Sol-scope and a Jupiter-scope [this video]
Cites Galaxeblaffer · 2023-03 · on “JWST gets best view yet of planet in hotly pursued star system”
good old Space Time has a pretty good video on this [LINK] and it might even be possible and more feasible to use planets [LINK] and even earth [this video] as lenses