Re: The Eye

Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 10:23:21 -0800


John K Clark, <johnkc@well.com>, writes:
> I can think of one way. If an on-off photo receptor has a field of view
> X degrees wide and you want to know where a star is to better accuracy than X,
> then turn your receptor 1/2 X degrees to the right, if you still register a
> pixel then the star must have been in the right half of the original field of
> view, if not then it was in the left.
>
> If we couldn't move our eyes but had to move our entire head I think we'd end
> up with some very tired and sore neck muscles or we'd be virtually blind.

I think it was something similar to this technique which was used by JPL
to get some Mars Pathfinder pictures in "super resolution". They took
multiple pictures at slightly different angles and combined them digitally
to produce higher resolution than the camera was capable of.

The human eye is constantly jiggling. If you manage to stare at an
object without moving your eyes, it disappears. Using artificial means
to stabilize an image on the retina, it quickly fades to invisibility.
So it is conceivable that the eye could produce higher resolution images
than the spacing of its photoreceptors would imply.

Hal