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THE VIDEO SHELF · astronomy telescopes

Turning Earth Into a Telescope | The Terrascope

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN people point to it as an excellent explanation of using Earth's atmosphere or gravity as a lens in astronomy threads.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Cool Worlds
Topic
astronomy telescopes
Format
explainer
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
4
HN mentions in dataset
10
Recommendation years in dataset
2020–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • You can pretty much make a telescope as large as you'd like, depending on your technological level. Hypothetically, you can use gravitational lensing to make a telescope via the sun! It's rather unfeasible at our current level of rocketry, but in time, maybe! Article: [LINK] …

    vlasev on Hacker News · 2020-07
    In When Hubble stared at nothing for 100 hours (2015)

  • I love the idea of using gravitational lensing of the sun from a lagrange point around Jupiter. IIRC it theoretically could image an earth like planet in the region of 1000px x 1000px so you could see continents and weather systems - perhaps even light …

    TomGullen on Hacker News · 2021-11
    In Astronomers want NASA to build a giant space telescope to peer at alien Earths

  • An excellent video on this: [VIDEO] Earths atmosphere and weather affects this sort of telescope IIRC and will filter out some lightwaves but seems like a much easier win

    TomGullen on Hacker News · 2022-07
    In Mission to reach and operate at the focal region of the solar gravitational lens

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.