On 3/16/11 11:31 AM, Chris Albertson wrote:
On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Hal Murray<[email protected]> 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.
Ahhh.. but what about me and a buddy who lives about a mile away with
line of sight between us? Or me and someone 50km away (albeit without
line of sight between)...
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
I'm thinking that you could do pretty darn well on a weekend hacker
budget..
Could you make the measurement in, say, 48 hours.. A portable setup
might be reasonable with a 10-20km baseline.
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