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MIMIR Telescope/Carrier Animation

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Sean_E:
There is also the thought that the telescope was not designed to shoot objects so close to itself.
It was designed to focus on stars and objects light years away and that is based off of light waves entering the telescope lens.  Not a literal physical object in such close proximity to itself.

BTAxis:
How is focusing on an object close to itself NOT based on light waves entering the telescope lens?

Psawhn:
I was thinking about that, but even though the space telescope can only focus at infinity, objects would still have to be exceedingly close (within several kilometres) before the object would be visibly blurry, I think.

Sean_E:
Lets put it into context of the human eye.
The eye has the ability to shift its focus very quickly on objects at various distances.  This is what gives us our telescopic vision.
Now, in terms of a space telescope, it is designed for one purpose...to focus on small points of light at an EXTREME distance based on different light wave frequencies. The Hubble Space telescope sees in Infrared, Gamma and UV light frequencies only.  It is only after computer analysis of these images and compositing do we get the full color images we all have known to enjoy viewing.

So, for a space telescope to 'suddenly' focus in on an object that is only a few hundred thousand miles away from it and moving close to MACH 10 in speed, is nearly if not impossible.  Thus blurred images, let alone images that aren't even in a visible light range to the human eye.

Psawhn:
I know what you're saying, and I think that even to a space telescope, a distance of several hundred km is as good as infinity as far as focusing is concerned.

The part I'm skeptical about is not focusing on the UFO, but the UFO staying in the shot longer than a fraction of a second. Relative velocities even in LEO can reach past 14 kilometres per second (Mach 10, which doesn't apply in space as there's no air or sound in space, is only about 3.4 km/s). At any distance, if the camera can zoom in to visibly see the UFO, the apparent velocity (speed the object moves across the sky) will be too high to see more than a streak in a single frame of video. The camera would have to somehow be rotating at the right speed to track the UFO, then the UFO miraculously jumps in front of the camera.

Actually, maybe the best way to fix this is to not have the tracking camera be a space telescope, but some other, lesser, camera with a wide field of view. Considering the Hubble can see the moon at this level (top image), even my zoomed-in shot is way too wide of an angle to be of any scientific value in a photography mission.

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