Telescopes

So, what I’ve learned in science this week:

Hans Lippershey was the first to come up with a description of a telescope, making him the creator, and was in the process of issuing a patent when Galileo heard about said design and built one himself. The majority of people know who Galileo is versus others who made contributions to the invention and popularization of the telescope, so he is one of the most famous astronomers there is. Giovanni Demisiani coined the name ‘telescope’, because ‘tele’ means far and ‘scope’ meaning seeing, i.e. ‘far seeing’. Telescopes work by using a ‘light bucket’, which is a primary/objective lens, which focuses the light to the eyepiece lens, which in turn focuses the image onto your retina. Our eyes are not large enough to capture a large enough amount of light to see far off images, but a telescope is much larger than our eyes, so it can ‘see’ more and concentrate it onto our eyes. There are two main categories of telescopes, Refracting and Reflecting. Refracting telescopes were the very first type of telescopes made. They work as I described before, but they aren’t necessarily the most popular type of telescope. They can get Chromatic Aberration, which is a type of distortion in which the lens’ fail to focus all the colors to the same convergence point. Which means that you see a rainbow halo thing when you look through it. (more on refracting telescopes: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/light/refracting.html ) Now, Reflecting telescopes. These were invented by Isaac Newton, and these use mirrors instead of clear lens’. The use of mirrors prevents Chromatic Aberration, meaning there isn’t a rainbow mist in the way of the stars, but as light doesn’t go through mirrors, but instead reflects off of them, some light will be blocked out, making for a picture that isn’t as good as it could be. (more on reflecting telescopes: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/reflecting_telescope.html ) Telescopes are our eyes in the sky. (Hahah)

End.