Exploration of the idea of a Multiple Gravitational Lens Telescope.
This project was inspired by discussions on Hacker News about the proposal for a Solar Gravitational Lens Telescope.
To determine whether there exists a configuration of stars (or other gravitational lenses) in the local galaxy that would enable a natural multiple gravitational lense telescope. The telescope would consist of a set of stars focusing distant light towards a collector based in our solar system. It is unknown whether there is such a configuration of stars that would allow observation of any interesting target. But it seems possible in principle to precompute the potential targeting field.
This project is hosted alongside Celestiary in order to use the local 100k star database, originally from Celestia, to run a search of stars and their lensing fields. The database contains star positions and types, which can be used to estimate mass. A star's mass determines its lensing field.
The Sun has a lens difraction of 1.73 arcseconds, which yields a focal length of 548-900 AU. This geometry determines the useful focal orbit for the SGLT. Similarly, some objects happen to have a gravitational lense that is already useful from Earth.
A Multi-Gravitational Lense Telescope would combine the lensing from multiple objects to form a synthetic aperature. So the task is to search for combinations of lenses that focus at a point somewhere in our Solar System.
The light arriving at the telescope would need to be filtered to remove the starlight from the lensing source, leaving only the objective's light for collection.
A related topic may be collimating lenses and their effectiveness. Some lasers achieve beams that diverge from parallel less in ~arcminute range, or better for larger lasers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_beam#Lasers
The code in this repo is currently used for a WIP calculator at https://celestiary.github.io/mglt/