How do reflecting telescopes work

For this reason, people wanted to find a new way to look into the sky. This lead to mirrors being considered for telescopes as early as the 17th century. Although a man named Robert Hooke created the first working telescope with mirrors, Issac Newton has been credited with the first practical scope design. It was still over a hundred years later that these telescopes would be perfected. There were problems with the metal used as backing at the time.

Silver-coated mirrors in the 19th century really changed the way that reflecting mirrors were created. Once the mirrors of the 20th century were backed with aluminum, reflecting telescopes become the choice for many astronomers. Inside the tube are mirrors that work at gathering and reflecting the image that you see in the sky.

The mirrors are curved and reflect light and form to create the image. But mirrors have their own problems. Have you ever looked into a spoon and noticed your reflection is upside down? The curved mirror in a telescope is like a spoon: It flips the image. Luckily, the solution is simple. We just use other mirrors to flip it back. A simple reflecting telescope uses mirrors to help us see faraway objects. Since they are much lighter than lenses, mirrors are a lot easier to launch into space. Space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope have allowed us to capture views of galaxies and nebulas far away from our own solar system.

Set to launch in December , the James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built. It will allow scientists to look at what our universe was like about million years after the Big Bang. Dubner University of Buenos Aires.

How Do Telescopes Work? The Short Answer:. Can u give diagrams Please. Mike - There are two basic types of telescopes, refracting and reflecting.

Refracting telescopes use lenses to focus the light, and reflecting telescopes use mirrors. Refracting telescopes work by using two lenses to focus the light and make it look like the object is closer to you than it really is.

This focus is directly in the path of the incoming light, so there are several ways of making images from the mirror visible. One is called a Newtonian reflector, where a flat mirror is used to point the light rays out to an eyepiece. There are several other types of reflectors that solve the issue of where to focus the light in different ways. Cassegrain reflectors have a convex secondary mirror and a hole in the middle of the primary mirror. Prime focus telescopes have no secondary optics and the observer or camera observes the image from near the focal point.

This arrangement is useful when optical equipment is being used that is too heavy to mount directly on the telescope.