...focus light with bendy glass and curved mirrors, as they have all done for a few hundred years. Best ones are on high mountains, or sent to 'space' beyond Earth's atmosphere. A different telly has been proposed: Team Aims To Find Earth 2.0 There may be a better 'explainer' of this tech elsewhere? == If sci fi is fiction, then >lightspeed travel is impossible, and nobody out there can visit anybody else. Sad! Super duper telescopes are end of story. If otherwise, ET might trouble themselves to come here, notice all our out-looking devices, and think better of us. Or, they could just eat us - but what an awfully long way to go for a meal.
Leaf Swordy sounds like a D&D character I came up with as a kid. The telescope uses this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating. When you see colors on the surface of CD as it is tilted in the light, that is a diffraction grating at work. This telescope doesn't produce a 2D image of the object, but converts the object's image light into a spectragraph that can be analyzed. https://www.space.com/18305-an-old-idea-gives-telescopes-a-new-twist.html The inventor's paper. http://www.3dewitt.com/PDF/3DeWitt_Dittoscope-Overview.pdf
