We're going to build a telescope, but it's not going to be like any telescope you've ever encountered in your life.

It's going to be different. It's going to be strange.

It won't even come with a lens, but it will be so powerful that you could take

a picture of an alien city sitting on the surface of a planet orbiting another star. Just as a

dramatic example, to be clear, I'm not saying that there are any alien cities nearby,

but you get my drift. And this telescope is going to use the sun itself.

But before I get into the construction of this strange, not a telescope, but still a telescope,

I want to build up just how powerful it can be.

In general, in astronomy, when we go to build a telescope, we care about three things.

One is the resolution, how sharp our image is, what minute detail can we see in the image.

That's our resolution. The second thing is the field of view. How broad of a view do we get?

You know, you've all seen that thing where, like, you look at something and your eyeball

has this fantastic field of view.

And then you hold up your phone camera and you're like, wait a minute, that's not everything

I'm capturing with my eye.

That's field of view.

And the third is wavelength. What wavelength of

light are we going to be observing at? And when we call a telescope powerful, it means it could be

powerful in any or all of these capacities. And for our purposes today, when I say we're,

we are going to build the world's most powerful telescope,

for now we're going to ignore the wavelength part because it's just not a major point of this story.

So thank you, wavelength.

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