Plenoptic / Light Field Camera?

[sanman]

Has anybody heard of this technology?

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27219/

http://www.lytro.com/cameras

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera


Could it be applied to astronomy? Has anyone tried to?
Seems like it would be great for amateur astronomy, among other things.

[pantaz]

All it does is divide a sensor (or frame of film) into numerous individual "frames", each one imaged with a slightly different focal distance. Therefore, it's no good for anything requiring high resolution images.

[sanman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenopt...era#Technology

The drawback of such a system is the low resolution that the final images have. As one microlens samples the light directions at one spatial point an increase in the number of image pixels can only be done by increasing the number of microlenses by the same amount. To overcome this limitation, Lumsdaine and Georgiev[3] describe a new design of a plenoptic camera, called focused plenoptic camera where the microlens array is positioned in front of or behind the focal plane of the main lens. This modification samples the light field in a different way that allows to have a higher spatial resolution by having a lower angular resolution at the same time. With this design images can be refocused with a much higher spatial resolution. However, the low angular resolution can introduce some unwanted aliasing artifacts.