
KH-12 Kennan Keyhole Secret Military Spy Satellite Photos - tacon
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-debris/astrophotography/view-keyhole-satellite/
======
gone35
Even more striking is the fact this was (likely) taken _by hand_ [1], and with
just a 10-inch aperture telescope!

[1] [http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-
debris/astrophotogr...](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-
debris/astrophotography/astrophotography-space-debris/)

------
ryanburk
website seems down, but google cache here:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9jrWlnp...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9jrWlnpM_5wJ:www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-
debris/astrophotography/view-keyhole-satellite/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
JshWright
If only we had a KH-12 on the ground we could use to take pictures of KH-12's
overhead...

~~~
dogma1138
You have much bigger telescopes than the KH-12 on the ground, it won't help
you much tho, magnification doesn't work with telescopes as you expect, and
you can always stack lenses to get more magnification but it won't matter.

Large telescopes have a much bigger field of view that's pretty much it. Even
angular resolution wont matter that much at these distances, satellites that
look like a blob on a prosumer telescope will look like a blob even if taken
from a full scale observatory.

~~~
welterde
That's not really correct. Most large telescopes have a small FoV for starters
(couple of arcminutes at best). Bigger telescopes gather more light and can
thus see fainter objects.

The biggest limit to angular resolution (beyond some rather small diameter
optic) is atmospheric seeing. This prohibits you from resolving anything
smaller than 0.5-2 arcseconds (depending on the site conditions) regardless of
the optic used.

But there are to compensate for atmospheric seeing: Adaptive optics (AO) and
Lucky Imaging (you don't integrate for a long time, but only take very short
exposures and once in a while you get lucky and the atmosphere doesn't distort
the image much and you get a very high resolution image). AO is what's usually
available at very large telescopes, while Lucky Imaging is usually done on
medium to small telescopes. And for LI gathering more light (and therefore a
bigger optic) does help.

So yes.. with a bigger telescope and a fast(er) camera you would probably be
able to take a better picture (and moving to a place with good seeing would
certainly help as well).

