alt Hacker NewsThat's insanely cool what kind of cameras / telescope are strong enough to do that? My guess is it was primarily hardware and not software bacuse of compute limits
Did the planes have to fly above clouds?
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sho_hn • 01/20/2025
Check out the CuriousMarc video series I linked under the OP, which gets into the sensor used and the encoding scheme.
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It would work on the ground, I believe the pilots (normally) had to get a fix before takeoff. You do need to see the sky without cloud cover, but spy satellites were less of a concern back then so less risk of being overflown during a daylight setup. The cameras are basically visible telescopes with very narrow fields of view and good baffling. Only a few stars are bright enough that you can sight off them, but it can be done. The device does a scan, so it's only accepting a small area on the sky and the initial fix can be sped up because you know where/when the aircraft is taking off. A lot of tricks to minimize the need for "plate solving", like knowing which direction the aircraft is pointing within some tolerance.
Info here: https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/4/4-3.php
It wasn't exactly a simple instrument to use, and it relied on a ton of planned course information. You could also do a cold midair start after a power outage, but preflight would be much more preferable!
Some modern microwave telescopes like BICEP3 have an additional optical telescope for star pointing that are daylight-usable, but in summer you need to use a big baffle tube. The images are taken with a high sensitivity CCD camera and you can pick out brighter target stars surprisingly well in the images.