In practice, you might struggle to do it well, but in principle, it could be a gigantic image sensor with no lens but a collimator on each pixel. You can angle the collimators to collect rays that would otherwise end up at the far-away camera.

Also, satellites photographing the Earth do it by moving the camera, and they can produce compression effects beyond what you'd get just because of their distance.

▲

ttoinou 2 days ago | parent [-]

For satellite you’re talking about taking the same surface on earth from different angles as the satellite orbits ?

	▲	foxglacier a day ago \| parent [-]
		No. I mean pointing the camera in a fixed direction as the satellite orbits, so it scans a strip along the surface of the Earth. This makes the rays parallel across the field of view (in the movement direction), so it looks like the camera is infinitely far away.