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PlaidBastard t1_iqrd0oq wrote

Light mostly doesn't scatter in a vacuum, but it does a little teeny bit because of the photons interacting with each other as they travel almost parallel but not the same wavelength and polarity (that would be laser light).

In the solar system, it's pretty negligible. If you get outside the atmosphere, the size of your lens/reflector and the brightness for far-out objects are the only limits to human-scale resolution. I don't know the math off the top of my head, but I doubt self-interference in the light would cause problems with even milimeter-on-Pluto-from-Earth resolution if you had a big enough telescope to capture and magnify that image.

Can anyone with more optics/physics/astronomy than me confirm, deny, or elaborate on that?

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duckfat01 t1_iqsj0d1 wrote

The smallest size that can be resolved by an optical system is given by the size of the Airy disc. This is aa property of the system, and is one measure of the quality of the system. Mirror systems will have smaller Airy discs than lens systems because they have no chromatic aberration, and large diameter optics generally have smaller Airy discs than small optics, for example.

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PlaidBastard t1_iqsk9u1 wrote

Oh, hey, the Airy Disk! I remember that from an undergrad physics class. Wikipedia reminds me that I'd know that ~1.22 factor for 'infinite' focus anywhere...

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nicuramar t1_iqv5xn8 wrote

> because of the photons interacting with each other as they travel almost parallel but not the same wavelength and pola

Isn’t the electromagnetic force linear up until very high energies? What do you mean interact?

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