Telescopes

And How They Work

Sam Ebersole and Austin Davis

Table of Contents
What is a Telescope?
How Optical Telescopes Work.
Refractor Telescopes
o Some Flaws with Refractor Telescopes
Reflecting Telescopes
o Some Flaws with Refractor Telescopes
Citations

What is a Telescope?
The telescope is essentially an instrument
used to gather some form of
electromagnetic radiation from a particular
spot in the distance, usually from space.
This information is then enlarged in order
to make accurate observations.

How Optical Telescopes Work.

-The lenses make the target appear closer due to the bending
and concentrating of light. The bent rays of light trick your
mind into creating an image that is larger.

Concave (diverging) lense

o Has a )( shape where the lens's focus is on the same side as the
light coming through, causing the refracted light to diverge away
from each other.

Convex (converging) lense

o Has a () shape where the lenss focus is on the opposite side from
the light coming through, causing the refracted light to converge to
that point.

Refractor Telescopes
The Refracting Telescope uses a larger convex lens to
bend light and focus it on a smaller convex lense.
The light rays entering your eyes appear to come from
a closer point, making the image appear larger.
Galileo Galilei built upon previous designs of the
period to create a telescope that he used to make
numerous discoveries.

Types of Telescopes: Refracting

Flaws With Refractive Telescopes.

One of the main issues with refractive telescopes is
that the different colors of the visible light spectrum
get refracted at different angles.
o This leads to images being stretched and
discolored.
The size of reflexive telescopes is also limited as large
lenses sag under their own weight.

Types of Telescopes: Reflecting

The first effective reflective telescope was made by
Isaac Newton, in part to solve the problems with
refracting telescopes.
They use a curved mirror at the back of the telescope
to reflect light to a diagonal mirror in the telescope
that reflects the light out to the observer.
Because of the curved mirror the light angles get
exaggerated making the object appear closer

Reflecting Telescopes

Flaws with Reflexive Telescopes

Though Reflexive telescopes are generally an
improvement over refractor telescopes, they do
present some challenges.
The mirrors used are very fragile and need constant
maintenance.
Because of the shape of the back mirror, observations
made near the edges of the field of view can become
distorted.

Citations
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/features/a
st20apr99_1/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refracting_telescope
http://www.onlinetelescopereviews.com/Reflector-Telescope.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflecting_telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_telescope_technology