Large Mirror Array Telescope, Archival Print

After visiting Kitt Peak National Observatory with its 26 telescopes. I began to wonder why we don’t create a giant array telescope by combining many smaller ones spread over a mile. My idea is to build a telescope array spanning one mile by strategically positioning multiple telescopes.

In this design, 32 telescopes with 2-meter mirrors would be evenly placed around a mile-wide circle, with an additional 2-meter telescope at the center. Complementing this outer ring, 84 smaller telescopes with 1-meter mirrors would be arranged in a Fibonacci (or sunflower) spiral. This layout maximizes the light collected from the sky by ensuring full, seamless coverage without unnecessary overlap.

An advanced control system would continuously adjust for atmospheric disturbances in real time, keeping all the telescopes perfectly in sync. This means that the array could work together as if it were a single, gigantic telescope.

The combined mirror area of this innovative design would offer seven times the light-gathering power of the James Webb Space Telescope. Even more impressive, it would provide imaging detail 200 to 250 times finer than JWST. In simple terms, this telescope array could capture incredibly detailed images of faint, distant objects, giving us a much clearer view of the cosmos than ever before.

Currently, there is no optical telescope on Earth specifically designed for this purpose. Although radio telescopes use similar techniques, and we occasionally adapt optical telescopes in a patchwork fashion, we do not yet have a single optical telescope solely dedicated to achieving this exact goal.