The invention of the telescope is unknown, yet in early 1600, several scientists made refracting telescopes. But in the year 1609, Italian scientist Galileo made a better version of the telescope that a Dutch inventor initially invented.
After this, several other telescopes were made. Yet another well-known invention was the reflecting telescope built by Isaac Newton, an English scientist. In 1937, the first radio telescope was built by a U.S. astronomer.
Scientists in the 1950s developed various other telescopes with spacecraft, and subsequently, they began launching them.
An Overview
A telescope is a device that lets us see distant objects clearly. The word telescope combines two Greek words tele – far off and skopos – viewer. Telescopes play an important role in the study of Astronomy.
It not only helps us to learn about the stars and planets but also all other objects that are there in outer space. The first type of telescope that people were familiar with was the optical telescope.
An optical telescope provides a magnified and detailed image using light in the viewable part of the spectrum.
Important Properties Of The Telescopes
The two important properties of the telescopes are as follows:
Light Gathering Potential- The greater the telescope can gather light, the finer one can see very far away faint objects or stars in the night sky. The size of the aperture of a telescope normally determines this specific feature. The greater the aperture, the greater light the telescope can collect.
Magnification- The magnification of the telescopes describes how much greater the telescope could make objects appear.
Types of Telescopes
There are two major types of telescopes, Reflecting Telescopes and Refracting Telescopes. Reflecting Telescopes type of telescopes uses a mirror to focus the image’s light, whereas Refracting Telescopes use lenses to magnify the image.
Reflecting Telescopes–
This type of telescope uses mirrors to focus the light. In this type, a concave mirror gathers light and reflects it back to a specific focal point. To get the light out of a telescope, a second mirror is used to direct the light to a specific eyepiece.
Different reflecting telescope designs are available, but the most popular one is the original design built by Isaac Newton.
Refracting Telescopes-
This type of telescope uses lenses to bend the light to a certain focal point so that the object gets magnified to the viewer.
The basic type of refracting telescope has two lenses. Here one lens is known as the objective lens, and the other lens is known as an eyepiece. The object lens is a convex lens that bends the ray tight to a certain focal point inside the telescope.
The eyepiece lens takes the light right from the focal point, which gets spread out across the retina of an eye. This feature helps to view the object closer than it is actually.
A Few Facts About Telescopes
The first telescopes that were built were normally used the military men and sea merchants.
Most observations that are done by telescopes are built on mountaintops. This is because the thin there is clearer and thinner.
Nowadays, most astronomers work remotely from where the telescope is mounted. Astronomers control the telescope by using computers and laptops over the internet.
The world’s largest number of refracting telescopes is located in Wisconsin, Yerkes Observatory.
The above-mentioned article gives a brief overview of the telescope. It also gives us information about the basic types of telescopes and a few interesting facts about telescopes.
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