Originally posted by phank
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It would be a neat idea to do it digitally sure, unfortunately it would require that we could sample the incoming signals fast enough to get their phase as well as their amplitude, and there's really no way for that to be sampled when it comes to light. We can do this with radio waves, but our instruments are capped out around 80GHz for something like this. There's a couple of orders of magnitude up to visible light. I guess you could do something similar to lightfields, but I'm not sure it would be practical without ending up costing you all the resolution you hoped to gain.
Or combining it with lenses over such distances? Now you're talking focal arrays the size of Earth or greater, and one gigantic assembly to combine it all... all while controlling for telescopes moving around in slightly irregular orbits... this is a project for a much older civilization than ours... but the result would be a telescope with enough angular resolution (presuming no real kinks emerge at that scale), that it could image the face of a coin, on the moon, in nearby star system.
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