Optical Field-Of-View

9104-003

The diagram shows the field-of-view of an infrared telescope in relation to the average angular distance between solar-type stars out to a distance of 1,000 light years. As can be seen, this average angular separation is much greater than the FOV of the 128 x 128 photodiode array. Hence, it does not make sense to conduct an "All Sky Survey" in the infrared spectrum, since most of the time the array would just be observing empty space! Note that the array FOV is not drawn to scale.

Copyright (c), 1991, The COSETI Observatory