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This is a really interesting idea. I believe, however, in this form it wouldn't quite work as expected. What you'd end up with is five terapixels of data, but n

This is a really interesting idea. I believe, however, in this form it wouldn't quite work as expected. What you'd end up with is five terapixels of data, but not a 5TP image. The way you'd get that 5TP picture is to arrange all those sensors in a grid and focus the image of your desired object onto that grid. In this form you'd end up with a very, very high resolution image because only a tiny fraction of the image would be falling on each sensor. Each fraction of the total image could then be combined into one mega image, and voila, your 5TP image! If you have a million people all focusing their 5MP cameras at the same object, you'd end up with a million photos of the same object, but without anything more than 5MP because the entire image would fall on each sensor. Perhaps people should donate their old phones to science and equivalent sensors could be arranged into a giant grid with a powerful lens attached. The only difficulty then would be atmospheric distortion, so perhaps a cheap trip out of our atmosphere would be in order! I propose we call it the Hacker Telescope.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Well outside the atmosphere we've already got a plan, its called the James Webb Telescope [1] :-) One of the weird things about light is that the photons that hit the camera sensor in California are not the same photons that hit the camera sensor in New York. So you could, if you chose to, add the two pictures together which would increase its brightness (more photons) and not change the content of the picture. The trick of course is figuring out which pixels in the camera sensor were getting the same (or nearly the same) photons. Since you are taking a picture of the stars, which are far enough away that parallax effects won't change their relative position, I should be possible to map the position of the stars in each image, combine it with the pointing vector from the accelerometer, to then create a projection matrix that would allow you to back project the camera pixels into an idealized focal geometric plane. Now you have a map of all of the various image pixels with respect to their projection onto this plane, and you can then add together like pixels. Or generate a pseudo 5mP image where each pixel is comprised of a million sub-samples. (sometimes I wish I could draw in this editor) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_webb_telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_webb_telescope
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  One hitch might be the precision of the sensors (accelerometers, etc) in the phones might not be sufficient to make this work! I'm all for tearing down a million old phones, removing the sensors, and blasting many "micro" telescopes into space!

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Well outside the atmosphere we've already got a plan, its called the James Webb Telescope [1] :-) One of the weird things about light is that the photons that hit the camera sensor in California are not the same photons that hit the camera sensor in New York. So you could, if you chose to, add the two pictures together which would increase its brightness (more photons) and not change the content of the picture. The trick of course is figuring out which pixels in the camera sensor were getting the same (or nearly the same) photons. Since you are taking a picture of the stars, which are far enough away that parallax effects won't change their relative position, I should be possible to map the position of the stars in each image, combine it with the pointing vector from the accelerometer, to then create a projection matrix that would allow you to back project the camera pixels into an idealized focal geometric plane. Now you have a map of all of the various image pixels with respect to their projection onto this plane, and you can then add together like pixels. Or generate a pseudo 5mP image where each pixel is comprised of a million sub-samples. (sometimes I wish I could draw in this editor) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_webb_telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_webb_telescope

kintamanimatt 14y ago
One hitch might be the precision of the sensors (accelerometers, etc) in the phones might not be sufficient to make this work! I'm all for tearing down a million old phones, removing the sensors, and blasting many "micro" telescopes into space!