A practical device may be an array of light sources and telescopes on a rotating mount or a set of moveable mirrors that achieve the same effect.
imaging technologies you mistook for imagination technologies and their gpu inside of a sega dreamcast or iphone, ipad,...
1.36 km = 0.85 miles
> To demonstrate the system’s capabilities, the team created a series of 8-mm-wide targets, each made from a reflective material and imprinted with a letter.
"To avoid this problem, the team divided their 100-milliwatt laser into eight beams. Each beam travels along a slightly different path through the turbulent atmosphere and thus receives a different random phase perturbation. Counterintuitively, this incoherent illumination makes the interference effects observable.
When I first started studying optical engineering, my teacher had worked on the first under-the-RADAR guidance system for bombers. He told lots of amusing stories, like how the pilots insisted on a manual override - so they "agreed" to provide a switch, noting to us manual piloting at near-treetop level and 1,000 ft/s is insane.
He taught us about the nominal amount of turbulence in the atmosphere, and that it limited space-based cameras to about half a foot resolution - a limit he said couldn't be broken. Therefore, license plates would never be readable from space...
Before I was out of grad school, they had broken it with laser techniques on nearby targets. Flash the laser at the same time as the image, scan the laser-illuminated spot, calculate the perturbance, and reverse-filter the image. A lot of processing (for that day), but it could be done back on Earth.
As you can see from the test images, the 8 lasers aren't enough to perfectly smooth out the noise. The noise is probably square-root-8 improved, so resolution should improve by a factor of not quite 3. Move those lasers slightly and repeat 12 times; you've improved resolution by 10. This is easy to do quickly; you should be able to read fine print held by a car passenger on the highway.
That's also how some adaptive optics work in astronomy,
Combining multiple exposures is not significantly different from a single longer exposure, except the key innovation of combining motion data and digital image stabilization which allows smartphones to approximate longer exposures without the need of a tripod.
So not only can you compensate for unwanted motion of the camera rig, but also for external factors like the atmosphere.
For faint deep-sky objects, IIRC you really do want long exposures, to overcome sensor noise. At least the comparisons I've seen using same total integration time, a few long exposures had much more detail and color compared to lots of short exposures.
That said, lots of short exposures might be all you can do if you're limited by equipment or such, and is certainly way better than nothing.
In microscopy, this is called 'super-resolution'. You can take many images over and over, and while the light itself is 100s of nanometers large, you actually can calculate the centroid of whatever is producing that light with greater resolution than the size of the light itself.
This oldish link would indicate inclusions of lead in aluminum at 330°C will move within 2nm in 1/3s but may displace by 100s of nanometers over time:
https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-Brownian-m...
You ought to read Tom Wolfe’s “the right stuff” asap if you haven’t already
Dramatically improve microscope resolution with an LED array and Fourier Ptychography
Either way, it's the "range" vs "single wavelength" that's key here. The green band (or blue band or red band) isn't one wavelength. It's an average over a fairly broad range. Single-wavelength (or very narrow range) images are quite different.
It’s probably more valuable as a surveillance and monitoring tool than an espionage one, but they would no doubt be the first customers (if not already).
And we are about to be saturated in them as soon as LiDAR full self driving goes mainstream
“Insect populations” is a funny way to spell secrets. Jokes aside, it does seem like this could serve a wide range of non-espionage related use cases. Really cool.
If the target cannot be rotated, can the two (or more) receivers revolve around a central axis? If so, presumably one of the receivers could revolve around the other (fixed) receiver to the same effect.
ck2•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment...
Not quite there yet at the amateur level, private industry soon, but then there is the question of safety to air traffic.
Can you imagine the first moon data link? JWST has 8mbps
eesmith•8mo ago
IAmBroom•8mo ago
Calwestjobs•8mo ago
vmh1928•8mo ago
https://www.modulatedlight.org/Modulated_Light_DX/MODULATED_...