Digital Observatory

It just occurred to me that it might be feasible to build an astronomical telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter, by assembling an array of digital cameras. Instead of building a giant mirror to gather as much light as possible, spread out an array of 10,000 cameras. Each lens is tiny, but add a bunch of them together and you can get a large amount of light gathering power. Of course there are a few problems with this idea. I doubt whether the lenses that cameras come with are suitable for this application, but building thousands a small lenses is something camera companies know how to do. I would hope it would be cheaper than building one giant mirror. Then you would need some sophisticated software to combine the digital images from all these cameras into one usable image. And lastly, it might take more like a million cameras to duplicate the light gathering power of one large telescope. Still, it might be worth looking into.