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There is another big problem with ultra-small luminosities: due to the small initial light + 1/r² decrease, it might be that only a few photons per hour sent by your target planet reach the diameter of Earth (better be in your telescope ! ). At very small luminosity you have to remind that light is not continuous and made of photons. And way before the ...

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The spatial resolution of a telescope is going to be limited in what it can resolve by something called the diffraction limit. Basically, light can only be focused so much by a lens given its initial starting size and the focal length of the lens. Its useful to think about this in terms of angular resolution for the case of telescopes, and the minimum ...

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It is very unlikely that such a system would be viable as an astronomical telescope since it it would be essentially unsteerable. The detection of very faint objects typically requires long exposure times, but I doubt if the solar array would be capable of getting an exposure of more than a few seconds before the target moved out of the field of view. In ...

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You can indeed build a telescope on these principles and indeed thinking about this kind of idea leads to an active branch of astronomy: very large radioastronomy arrays. At optical frequencies the idea is hard to make practicable on the ground (but see David Hammen's answer for space telescopes): the mirrors would need to be aligned to produce a ...

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Regarding the question raised in the title, Is it possible build a telescope on a field of mirrors? The answer to this question is a resounding "yes". A number of existing and planned telescopes use arrays of mirrors, depicted below. Noteworthy amongst them include the James Webb Space Telescope, which will use an array of eighteen hexagonal mirrors, ...

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