Why not? A telescope will give you ridiculously accurate angular resolution.

In some versions of Traveller: gravitic lenses. Moderately large physical lens, huge, huge, huge effective lens. You should be able to make out the ship class, and then you can estimate distance with a combination of focus and measuring angular size.

On Jun 25, 2015 12:24 AM, "William Ewing (via tml list)" <nobody@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
>
> And what fire control sensor are you using? Not a telescope. It's not the flash that gives you target coordinates. 
>
> ________________________________
> From: Tim <tim@little-possums.net>
> To: "tml@simplelists.com" <tml@simplelists.com>
> Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:00 AM
>
> Subject: Re: [TML] sensors and ops (was berthing)
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 05:38:05AM +0000, William Ewing (via tml list) wrote:
> > More likely approximate. Radar and other tech is only going to get
> > so good.
>
> There's no need for radar.  Coming out of jump space (in multiple
> rulesets) produces a bright EM "flash" across a broad range of
> wavelengths.  If a sensor system can't get a bearing on that to within
> at most a square arcsecond, it's not worth the cardboard it was made
> from.
>
> Given at least one ruleset, the jump flash is visible *without
> instruments* at a million kilometres, which is roughly 100D range for
> terrestrial planets
>
>
>
>
>
> - Tim
> -----