Recent comments in /f/space

cardinals1392 t1_j41snn3 wrote

"Failure is not an Option" was never said during the Apollo program, it was invented for the movie. NASA pretty famously failed a lot early on but what they learned during those failures eventually got us to the moon. This article essentially says that we should be taking more risks in the name of innovation, EXACTLY like the Apollo program. So I guess you are completely right, one of those philosophies did get us to the moon: the second one.

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midnight_mechanic t1_j3zl52o wrote

What kind of resolution are you looking for? How many times magnification? You can see things more than a light year away now. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye and that's millions of light years away.

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deathofanage t1_j3zjuxs wrote

Reply to comment by UmbralRaptor in Curious by Reckless_Kiddies

With a big enough aperture and enough time you could see the surface of the nearest exoplanets. But that would require something with an aperture the size of the moon or jupiter.

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lawblawg t1_j3zhk2e wrote

There is no limit to how far you can see, if the object is bright enough.

Your eyes can see individual stars that are up to 16,000 lightyears away. You can also see the diffuse glow of the galactic core, which is around 25,000 lightyears away. And on a dark night you can even spot the glow of the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2,500,000 lightyears away.

A telescope doesn't change how far you can see; it changes how faint of an object you can see. An object that is twice as far away has to be four times as bright for you to be able to see it. An object that is 10 times as far away has to be 100 times as bright for you to be able to see it. Telescopes collect light from a large area and focus it into a smaller area, allowing you to see objects that would ordinarily be too dim.

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UmbralRaptor t1_j3z7i7t wrote

Because of how they work, it makes more sense to talk about a telescope's light gathering ability and angular resolution than how far it can see. If you're including a specific detector (your eyes, some CCD, whatever), you can also directly talk about the faintest objects possible.

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