This is the magic of folded optics. High quality glass of various sorts and an artful mix of mirrors and lenses gets you this 100x improvement.
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Think how mind-blowing this is. For Galileo it was a real shock to see the phases of Venus and Jupiter with satellites. That stuff has gotten a bit meh now due to space missions, but imagine how huge it was in the 1600s to see discs other than the sun and moon.
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You can still get Galilean soul-stirring goosebumps by looking at Jupiter or Saturn live through a small hobby scope. It’s not as dramatic as Cassini or Juno mission photos, but otoh you’re seeing LIVE images. Photons hitting your eyes are literally from Jupiter/Saturn.
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It sometimes makes me very sad that so much of the universe is read-only. You can see it but not reasonably expect to get to it. Still the fact that we can read so much more than we can write creates a kind of life poetry out of our instruments.
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“Ah, but a man’s teach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?” — Robert Browning. This is not a universal sensibility though. One of the weirdest life experiences for me is that there are people who are simply completely disinterested in things they can’t act on.
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Sherlock Holmes was one. He didn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun, and when Watson tells him, he days he’ll do his best to forget the fact. There’s many people like this. Agency or nothing. The read-only universe might as well not exist.
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‘The purpose of humanity is to build bigger telescopes’ isn’t a bad philosophical axiom. It’s certainly more meaningful than ‘build bigger computers’ or ‘create more material comfort’ or ‘relieve more suffering’ imo. Ground species purpose in boundary conditions of consciousness.
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Damn. TIL NRO spy satellites are probably more powerful than Hubble in raw optical terms though designed for spying on your phone rather than distant galaxieshttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1292596559184420864?s=21 …
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End of conversation
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I never enjoyed optics