Resolution Dreaming (2014)

This is a followup to Proxima. This time, I am not pretending to know French or be cultured.

I would like to thank Nitpicker for helping me muddle through calculating the necessary mirror size. That’s not his real name of course but he’ll know who he is if he ever reads this.

To create the fake image of a star on the right I took a real Hubble exposure of Neptune and simply brightened the planet’s disc to a flat white.

“A single Hubble PC1 pixel is 0.046” wide and Proxima Centauri has been measured to about 0.001” in diameter. Proxima Centauri is therefore only 2% of the width of a single pixel in the image to the left. Hubble’s mirror would have to be over a kilometer wide to achieve this resolution.”

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.