Spaceship based telescopes

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Actually, I think it's also being used in fluorescence microscopy these days, where the point-like objects you are looking to localize are individual fluorescent molecules.

True. It's also useful in radar -- aircraft are reasonably likely to be a blurry blip, but you can usefully aim at the center of the blur as long as they're in midair.

A lot of the problem with statistics is that figures like 'magnification' aren't actually meaningful -- you can magnify by as much as you want. What you want is resolution.

This also applies to night vision gear. Typical NVG only has around 100x the raw light-gathering power of a dark-adjusted human eye, but it might well turn the gain up to well over 100x, because if you do, the user can use it at night without waiting half an hour for his eyes to adjust.