What is the resolution of the Hubble space telescope? What would the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope be if it were a digital camera? Gigapixels? Terapixels?

1 Answer
Mar 10, 2016

The resolution of the Hubble is about 8 mega pixels.

Explanation:

Hubble is not like a regular digital camera in that it doesn't take a single image in one shot.

The Hubble's CCD cameras can take monochrome images at a resolution of 0.05 arc seconds. It takes a number of small mega pixel images at different wavelengths. The images are then artificially coloured and superimposed to give a coloured image.

Each of the images are quite small. Multiple images are stitched together to form a much larger mosaic.

All of the impressive images for Hubble are in fact composites of many small images.