Networked telescopes

A very short one since I am still recovering from a painful trapped nerve that has prevented me writing. Anyway, the best ideas are often the simplest. I re-discovered this one in a 2008 article I wrote but I don’t think it has been done yet and it easily could.

So you buy a telescope for use at home. You point it up at a planet or a star. It probably does a magnification of a few hundred. Why not add a digital zoom that is linked to networked images from large telescope such as Hubble? When you reach the limits of your cheaper version, you see images from more expensive better ones. You also could swap to radio or IR or xray images just as easily. Adding that networked function would be fairly simple and cheap, maybe adding a few tens of dollars even to do it well.

Naturally, you could add networked zoom to cameras too, for landscapes and beauty spots anyway.

You could just make a fully digital telescope of course that has no real telescope function at all, just seeming to be one, and working the same way except that ll the images it provides are digital, using direction tracking to pull up the right one.

Ok, my arm hurts again.