Flat Earth Fever: Nikon P900 - 100% complete telescope replacement, cancel the James Webb!

Flat Earthers have made another amazing discovery!  We can cancel all those expensive telescope projects -- all you need is a HAND-HELD P900 with no manual focus and you can image anything!

Or... we can add 'basic optics' to the things that Flat Earthers fail to understand...

What I want to know is WHY do you believe that blurry, shaky, hand-held images of anything through a lens pushed beyond it's diffraction limit is an accurate representation?

When you view the planets and stars through quality telescopes, that are correctly aligned and focused, not being hand-held with shaky, violently moving around images they do not look anything like these images. Why is that?

Are you aware that image resolution is limited by the aperture of the optical instrument? A tiny camera aperture can only magnify it's own optical errors, giving you a completely false image. This is why telescopes are made larger and larger every year -- 10-inch, 14-inch, and now up to 32 FOOT wide telescopes enable greater image resolution that no tiny P900 camera can hope to achieve. Especially when the P900 lacked true manual focus -- it is incapable of being accurately focused because the stepper motor in the P900 steps are too large.

Resolution is limited by diameter -- this is a well-established FACT of optics.

So how do you justify this?

Here is what a quality observing instrument looks like:

That's an ~$8000 telescope mounted on an ~$10000 mount and several thousand more dollars in eyepieces, tripods, and cameras. Your $500 P900 isn't even in the same league - you have purchased a toy.  You do not have elite equipment.

Your P900 gives between 1-2 MP of useful image data when pushed to it's maximum focal length of 357mm -- yeah, they CALL IT 2000mm but it's actually 357mm -- it only APPEARS to be 2000mm because what they did was give you a TINY little sensor (1/2.3") instead of a full frame sensor.   You put a 500mm lens on any prosumer grade camera with a Full Frame sensor and it will outperform your P900.  Uneducated consumers buy this thing because they think 83x sounds cool but don't realize that what really happened is Nikon pre-cropped their image way down.

83x is another number game with the P900 - that is the Zoom range (357mm/4.3mm), not the magnification power, which is actually ~56x and a Dawes' limit of about 2.11 arcseconds (that means you can't resolve objects more than 2.11 arcseconds apart).

For comparison, a 750mm LX70 6" telescope with a 2x Barlow and 6.4mm eyepiece is 234x power ((750 x 2)/6.4) and with 3x Barlow is 351x power ((750 x 3)/6.4) and has a Dawes' limit of about 0.77 arcseconds.

See this period >>  .  <<

"With that 1 pixel my lens is a 16,000mm lens equivalent!  Isn't it great!?  That's 4000x baby!  Let's see the Hubble do that! Ok, so it's cropped to just 1 pixel..."  That is what P900 owners get.

Your P900 has a 1/2.3" sensor -- that's the TINY little blue box, one up from the smallest shown here. Phone sensors are in the 1/4" - 1/3" range. Your $500 camera has a sensor only slightly larger than my phone.

These telescopes can push 400x and image Full Frame and not be beyond their diffraction limit (see Dawes' limit).

Now don't get me wrong -- for $500 the P900 is a decent Point & Shoot -- it will grab Point & Shoot grade images that other Point & Shoot cameras cannot, for a reasonable amount of money that most people can afford.  But you just embarrass yourself when you try to claim that this a telescope replacement.

And guess what, when you use real, quality Telescopes, you get not shaky, not PLAINLY AND OBVIOUSLY 100% blurry images out of them like this image of Mars from Thierry Legault:

MARS on August 20 2003 0h42UT, good conditions, 12" Schmidt-Cassegrain, Neptune 100 B&W video camera, RGB filters RRGB combination (luminance=125 images) Altitude above the horizon : 31°
Image Credit: Thierry Legault

Meanwhile, Flat Earthers actually claim this is the REAL mars and the above is a fake -- this is taken from the above video.

Clearly these people have zero shame or zero sense -- honestly not sure which.