hackertube.io

Turning Earth Into a Telescope | The Terrascope

Cool Worlds · explainer · Watch on YouTube

Cosmology & astrophysicsSpace exploration & spaceflight

What it is

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN people point to it as an excellent explanation of using Earth's atmosphere or gravity as a lens in astronomy threads.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “It's an amazing video”

    Using Earth's atmosphere as a lens for telescopes.

    vlasev, 2020-07 · Recommendation · in “When Hubble stared at nothing for 100 hours (2015)”

  2. “you could do similar with atmospheric lensing of the earth from a lagrange point near the moon”

    Cheaper atmospheric lensing mission using Earth from a lagrange point.

    TomGullen, 2021-11 · Recommendation · in “Astronomers want NASA to build a giant space telescope to peer at alien Earths”

  3. “You might be interested in this video which talks about using the Earth's gravity to create a telescope”

    Telescope using Earth's gravity as a lens.

    spartanatreyu, 2022-11 · Recommendation · in “First active chemistry on an exoplanet revealed by Webb telescope”

  4. “David Kipping has a great video on it”

    Great video on imaging with Earth-lens focal region.

    usful, 2023-03 · Recommendation

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: terrascope, atmospheric lensing, david kipping, extremely large telescope, exoplanets

Also recommended by the same people