Telephoto Camera Lens Assists Dark Matter Find(quantamagazine.org) |
Telephoto Camera Lens Assists Dark Matter Find(quantamagazine.org) |
The basic reason for this is that as you increase the size of your telescope, not only does the collecting area increase, but the area of the image increases as well. So if you're looking at a diffuse source like a galaxy, the increased number of photons gets spread out over a larger area and the total number of photons per pixel remains the same. This isn't a problem for point sources (like stars) because even as the image size increases, all the photons from a point source still fall in the same pixel so the source appears brighter to the detector.
As peter303 also mentioned, refracting telescopes don't suffer from the same artifacts that reflecting telescopes do, which is why these surveys use small telephoto lenses rather than small reflectors.
Incidentally, this is related to a puzzle: can you burn a paper with moonlight if you have a sufficiently big magnifying glass? It turns out that you cannot (at least as long as you're using a normal magnifying glass that brings light to a focus), because the highest temperature you can produce is the temperature at the surface of the moon. In the limit of having an infinitely big magnifying glass, the view from the sheet of paper would be the same as the view from the moon, and so the temperatures would be the same as well [1].
[1]: Making various assumptions about radiative thermal equilibrium, etc.
Well, small telephoto lenses relative to most telescopes, pretty darn big relative to most camera lenses ;)
http://www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/instrumentation/dragonfly/
An example with the details as it used only 8 lenses:
http://inspirehep.net/record/1278457
Previously on HN with some good comments:
Edit: this xkcd does a wonderful elaboration on the fire - by - moonlight topic https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
The only other interesting surface-brightness-related fact I can think of at the moment is that surface brightness fluctuations can be used to measure the distance to galaxies. This is one of the cases where it helps to have a really big telescope.
The basic idea is that although galaxies are extended sources, they're really just a collection of point sources --- they're just a bunch of stars grouped together in an area of the sky. Now suppose you have two similar galaxies (at least they have similar stellar densities) and one of them is close by and the other is far away. The nearby galaxy will have relatively few stars per pixel and the distant galaxy will have many more stars per pixel. Since the stars are randomly distributed, the number of stars in any given pixel will be given by a Poisson distribution. A consequence of this is that in the nearby galaxy there will be a lot of variation in the flux from one pixel to the next, whereas in the distant galaxy the image will be much more smooth. So even though the average flux per pixel from both galaxies is the same, you can still tell which one is close and which one is distant based on the surface brightness fluctuations.
What the physics in the article prove is that you cannot generate a higher temperature than the color temperature of the black body whose light you are refracting.
The moon is not a black body emitter, it is a diffuse reflector. I will grant that you cannot start a fire by reflecting the blackbody emissions of the moon during a complete lunar eclipse.
However, I experimentally proved to myself that I can start a fire with sunlight reflected off an ordinary mirror. The mirror was about room temperature, but the magnifying glass produced a much higher temperature. I never got around to taking a giant parabolic reflector out on a full moon night to measure the temperature change, but I remain convinced that it would work. Seeing this repeated here makes me think I should.
To get a little technical, if the Sun is reflected by either a diffuse or specular reflector, the integrated surface brightness over 4 pi steradians surrounding the reflector will be equal to the integrated surface brightness around the same point if the reflector had not been present.
The difference is that in the case of the diffuse reflector, the specific intensity becomes isotropic, but in the case of a specular reflector, the specific intensity is unidirectional. Now, from your perspective somewhere off to the side looking at the reflector, you only intercept a small fraction of the magnitude of the specific intensity in the case of a diffuse reflector. But you intercept the entire magnitude of the specific intensity if the alignment is right, and zero otherwise. So the surface brightness you're able to observe is unchanged in the case of a specular reflector (if the alignment is right), but is reduced by the solid angle subtended by the reflector as seen by the source divided by 4 pi.
So it is not surprising that if you take a magnifying glass to an image of the Sun in a mirror you can start a fire. But this doesn't mean that you'd be able to use a diffuse reflector like the moon to do the same thing. After all, a white baseball is also a diffuse reflector and is reflecting the Sun's light on a sunny day. But I doubt you will be able to put a magnifying glass to it and light a piece of paper on fire. But you should get a big Fresnel lens and go out the next time there's a full moon and prove it to yourself! (The big Fresnel lens will be fun for a lot of other experiments, too.)