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The Telescope the Size of a Galaxy: What Giant Telescopes Could Reveal About Other Worlds and Cosmic Time
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 22 2026
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Suppose we could build a telescope as wide as Earth.
Then as wide as the Sun.
Then as wide as the Solar System.
And finally-as absurd as it sounds-as wide as the Milky Way.
What would we actually see?
The Telescope the Size of a Galaxy begins with an outrageous thought experiment and follows it as far as real physics will allow. Using an imaginary nearby world called Lantern, Felix Quarkweather explores what increasingly enormous telescopes might reveal about another planet-from clouds and continents to possible technology-and where even an impossible observatory would finally run into limits it cannot overcome.
Along the way, the book explains what telescopes really do, why magnification is not the same as resolution, how interferometry allows separated telescopes to work together, why collecting more light matters, how astronomers reconstruct images from imperfect measurements, and how the Sun itself could be used as a gravitational lens.
Then comes the stranger question: could an enormous telescope let us see another world as it exists right now?
The answer leads directly into light-travel time, relativity, cosmic distance, black holes, the earliest observable universe, and the unavoidable fact that looking across space is also looking into the past.
Written for readers who are curious rather than technically trained, The Telescope the Size of a Galaxy uses clear explanations, calculations, scientific research, illustrations, and a little humor to explore one enormous question:
If there were almost no limit to the telescope we could build, what limits would the universe itself still impose?
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