Suppose one of the 10-m-diameter Keck Telescopes in Hawaii is trained in San Francisco, 3400 km away. Assuming 550-nm light, and ignoring atmospheric distortion, would it be possible to read newspaper headlines?
Suppose one of the 10-m-diameter Keck Telescopes in Hawaii is trained in San Francisco, 3400 km away. Assuming 550-nm light, and ignoring atmospheric distortion, would it be possible to read newspaper headlines?
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Transcribed Image Text:Suppose one of the 10-m-diameter Keck Telescopes in Hawaii is trained in San Francisco, 3400 km
away. Assuming 550-nm light, and ignoring atmospheric distortion, would it be possible to read
newspaper headlines?
Expert Solution
Concept and Principle:
- Optical imaging is affected by the diffraction of light. When imaging small or distant objects there is a fundamental restriction on capturing the details of the object. This is known as the diffraction limit.
- Thus using the diffraction limit we can write the maximum resolution for an optical instrument as,
Here λ is the wavelength and D is the diameter of the aperture.
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