Hand of the maker

[mmcirvin]

The makers of kitschy commercial religious art of the Christian persuasion should be grateful to the telescope builders of the world for so often putting the secondary mirror struts in a cross shape.

Comments

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

I originally wondered how you could run strings across a binary telescope to decompile the secret passphrase from it.

And now I wonder if you can can come up with any funky shapes (I dunno, a graphic of a cat chasing a laser pointer?) using different strings, although you'd need to somehow compose a fourier transform of your funky shape to have it come out right, if I remember the theory of diffraction spikes correctly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You'd pretty much need something like a hologram placed across the mouth of the telescope. That's what a hologram is--a diffraction grating constructed so as to make an arbitrarily funky image in the diffracted light.