How does reflecting telescope

Unlike a lens, a mirror can be very thin. A bigger mirror does not also have to be thicker. Light is concentrated by bouncing off of the mirror. So the mirror just has to have the right curved shape.

It is much easier to make a large, near-perfect mirror than to make a large, near-perfect lens. Also, since mirrors are one-sided, they are easier than lenses to clean and polish. 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 amount the image is enlarged depends on the power of the eyepiece lens.

A person sees the magnified image through the eyepiece. Light rays from distant objects in space fall on the first, or primary, mirror. Light rays travel in straight lines. This telescope can be moved from side to side as well as up and down. This allows the user to view objects in space in all directions. 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. Reflecting telescopes have many advantages over refracting telescopes. Mirrors don't cause chromatic aberration and they are easier and cheaper to build large.