Timeline for Reformatting Death Stars as powerful telescopes
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
26 events
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| Feb 8, 2018 at 5:46 | comment | added | Shawn V. Wilson | And they have have plenty of room for factories and stuff: they can spend decades churning out mirrors or repairing the existing ones. (Unless someone invents an opaque, reflective force field that's weightless, although uses energy) | |
| Feb 8, 2018 at 5:45 | comment | added | Shawn V. Wilson | As for stationkeeping: Death Stars can move between systems. Staying in place is trivial. | |
| Feb 8, 2018 at 5:41 | comment | added | Shawn V. Wilson | If he has Death Stars, doesn't he have equivalent technology? FTL communication would solve the problem of the distance between the two. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 8:41 | comment | added | Darth Wedgius | @VictorStafusa You may want to reconsider having th telescopes manned by stormtroopers. Historically , their aim has left something to be desired. | |
| Jan 20, 2015 at 20:53 | comment | added | Victor Stafusa | Two big telescopes separated by that distance observing time differences in stars light curves would reveal transiting exoplanets much easier and with a higher confidence than a single telescope. The same could be used for transiting exomoons orbiting exoplanets. | |
| Jan 11, 2015 at 15:41 | comment | added | celtschk | Depending on the problem you try to solve, the time difference of the telescopes may not be tjhat problematic. For example, for the most obvious use, determining the distance of a star through its parallax, this has been done by waiting half a year between two images, so the earth orbit diameter could be used (there's a reason why distances are usually given in parsecs). A few hours are nothing compared to that. For short-time events, I guess times might be easily resynchronized afterwards by simply identifying a specific point in time (for example, the maximum brightness of a supernova). | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 20:10 | history | edited | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added paragraph about reflecting mirror.
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| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:54 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @MarchHo Ah, I see. | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:53 | comment | added | March Ho | If the probe orbits the main lens, there is no way for the main lens has to be colinear over any length of time between the probe and the imaged object. The only way the probe can work is for it to be fixed to the main lens. | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:50 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @MarchHo What would be the problem? | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:50 | comment | added | March Ho | Wait, I will have to retract the option of an orbiting reflector/lens, for the reason that it would suffer from the same problem as a terrestrial telescope without an equatorial mount. | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:49 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @MarchHo Hm. It's an interesting idea. I'll think about this. | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:48 | comment | added | March Ho | Both seem to be feasible options, considering it is in a Lagrangian point. A megastructure sticking out of one side isn't too unbelievable either, since the gravity of the Death Star isn't large enough to prevent a sufficiently strong megastructure from being built out of it. | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:46 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @MarchHo Are you proposing a mirror directly attached to the Death Star, or orbiting with it in space? | |
| Jan 10, 2015 at 19:46 | comment | added | March Ho | I think the issues with the focal point of the Death Star lenses should not be too difficult to overcome. It shouldn't be too difficult to maintain a (relatively) small reflector mirror probe to gather the light that passes through the Death Stars. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 23:23 | vote | accept | Victor Stafusa | ||
| Jan 9, 2015 at 23:22 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @Victor Hmm. I'd split up the stormtroopers equally between the two Death Stars, and add a base on Neptune's large moon, Triton. TIE fighters can deploy from there and Uranus, if it happens to be in the neighborhood. Vader might find a nice home a bit farther out, on Pluto. :-) I, too don't know just how the two eyes would help in exoplanetology. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 23:19 | comment | added | Victor Stafusa | Great. I did not said that they would be unmanned (but not said the opposite either). Do you remember my stormtroopers? Where do you think that they are? :D So there would be a lot of very dedicated people working in alignment, communication, operation and maintenance issues. :D About the two eyes, what you answered is exactly what I would like to see, 3D images of stars (at least in the Milky-Way) and precise parallax measurements. I can think of some benefits of having two eyes in exoplanetology, especially to discover and characterize exomoons though honestly I don't know exactly how. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 22:58 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @Victor I tried to address those in my edit. For a summary, though - you're probably right. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 22:57 | comment | added | HDE 226868♦ | @NeilSlater Now I understand what you mean. I'm not quite sure how to work those considerations into my answer, though, so I think I'll pass on talking about them. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 22:57 | history | edited | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 9, 2015 at 17:02 | comment | added | Victor Stafusa | So far, a great answer. I am waiting for the benefit of two eyes. I think that claiming that the fix for orbital issues as "nonexistant" is a premature conclusion, since the wobble is predictable and very slow due to the very long time that Neptune takes to circle the Sun. Further, a time difference of some hours will not probably cause problems as long as the farthest telescope capture a image some $y$ time later than the nearer capturing the same image, in a way that $y$ is the difference in the times that the captured light takes to hit each telescope. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 8:17 | comment | added | Neil Slater | I could probably have avoided mentioning absorption/scattering in my earlier comment. It is getting too detailed. But obviously you don't get to see through things that block light - interstellar extinction is a very good example, and worth keeping in your answer. | |
| Jan 9, 2015 at 8:08 | comment | added | Neil Slater | Regarding light collecting area . . . this is about counting photons. If your source emits 10^10 photons per second, and you want to image it, your light collecting area needs to intercept some of those photons. It's no good having great angular resolution if no light from the object you want to image arrives. More practically you need to trade off exposure time (and time resolution) versus image signal/noise when you start operating near the limits of your telescope. Think of the Hubble deep field image, it took 42 hours to image whole galaxies due to this effect. | |
| Jan 8, 2015 at 23:35 | history | edited | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 8, 2015 at 23:25 | history | answered | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |