Moon landing conspiracy theorists - lend me your ears.

[MickyD]

Resolution of a billion dollar spy satellite at around 300mm and now someone posts the Hubble at 2.5 billion dollars at an amazing but believable 160mm if you know it's build spec.

40mm?? - Sensationalist stuff without evidence or the need to provide evidence that sells magazines.

I'll look on my system, years ago I had a hi res picture taken from a real spy satellite not sure if I still have it or on a CD somewhere (probably because I remember it was massive in size).

Most trucking companies use live GPS tracking I thought (?) and I know it's law in some countries so why would they need or use hideously expensive satellite video tracking??

all of this.

I could MAYBE believe they could read a VERY large headline, but no way could newsprint be read. Maybe in a vacuum it might be possible, but not through 100+km's of atmosphere. [scotty]Ye canna overcome the laws of physics[/scotty]

[80DGY]

enhance... enhance...

:rotflol:

[sejanus]

Well there ya go, that's a lot better than I thought it'd be.
Though reading a number plate on a car from a satellite is very hard to do, as they point down at a steep angle, too steep to read most plates. If you get at the right angle they have to look through a hell of a lot more atmosphere to do that, and that makes it far more difficult.
Sure it wasn't from a spy plane?

sorry didn't mean i actually read license plates, but it was very much at that sort of detail. i.e. people in the street, you could clearly see the hair on their head, clothes they were wearing, you could make out windshield wipers on cars , that sort of detail. it was a tiff file and was on a disc and was a couple of hundred meg. wish i still had it. Was about 7-8 years ago.

[Billzilla]

sorry didn't mean i actually read license plates, but it was very much at that sort of detail. i.e. people in the street, you could clearly see the hair on their head, clothes they were wearing, you could make out windshield wipers on cars , that sort of detail. it was a tiff file and was on a disc and was a couple of hundred meg. wish i still had it. Was about 7-8 years ago.

Fairy nuff.
I'm still very curious as to how they get around the atmosphere problem.

[sejanus]

possibly something along the lines of this ;

One technique to overcome atmospheric distortion is called adaptive optics. With this system, an artificial guide star is projected into the sky with a laser. A computer watches how the artificial star is distorted by the atmosphere, and then warps portions of the mirror many times a second to counteract these distortions. Unfortunately, this technique only works really well in the infrared spectrum.

But a new camera system has been developed to bring this power to the visible spectrum as well. The “Lucky Camera” works by recording partially corrected images taken using the adaptive optics system at very high speed, capturing more than 20 frames a second. Most of these images are still smeared by the atmosphere, but the occasional one is crisp and clear and unblurred. The software can recognize these clear ones, and keeps them to later assemble into a single, sharp image.

Using this software on the 5.1 metre Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, astronomers were able to achieve images with twice the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. Previously, it was 10 times worse.

It captured images of the globular star cluster M13, located 25,000 light-years away, and astronomers were able to separate stars that were only one light-day apart. It also showed incredibly fine detail on the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), revealing filaments which are only a few light-hours across.

Just imagine what will be possible when this technology comes to the even larger Keck II and Very Large Telescopes; not to mention the incredible possibilities with the upcoming 30-metre class telescopes still in the planning stages.

Also the older 70's spy satellites actually were able to swoop down lower, take a pic and then boost themselves back up again. I assume the really modern stuff could do this as well.

I'd love to get my hands on proper info about the current ones up there, fascinating.

70's one - http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1283/1

[Billzilla]

Ok really interesting. They might have some tricky software that picks the sharpest parts of all those images and stitches them together into one good one as well.

There's also active optics which is what I was talking about before, but that really only works on the big mirrors. That's where they point another smaller telescope at a known star and look at the image, and see how it's distorted, then apply corrections to the big main mirror with tiny little motors to flex it ever so slightly to take out the wobbles the atmosphere generates. Merely very difficult to do on Earth, I can't imagine how to to it on a stealthy satellite.

[Rdyno]

i wonder if there was a mirror in space could the keck look at the mirror and see a image of earth it would be like the worlds best spy camra

[Al GTi-R]

I might be wrong - And that would mean some cool new technology I'd love to find out about.

You could always email DIGO and ask.

[Billzilla]

You could always email DIGO and ask.

Thanks, and I'll tell them you sent me.

[Sketchy]

i wonder if there was a mirror in space could the keck look at the mirror and see a image of earth it would be like the worlds best spy camra

I, erm, what?

[Billzilla]

I, erm, what?

That's actually an interesting idea, though really hard to do.

The Keck is a really large telescope array in Hawaii. What DynoWoger is saying is if you could point it at a large mirror in orbit you could see back down to Earth and look at stuff.
PF would use it to look down girls tops, of course.

[Sathanas]

Sounds similiar to a theory of sending a mirror into space, millions of miles away. Can then look back in time. Of course its useless as you can't see further back then the mirror was launched (unless you can make it travel faster then light)

[big_pete]

:knock::knock:

[Rdyno]

Aliens.

[big_pete]