![]() ![]() This is a process that involves coating glass and mirrors with a silvery coating that massively increases their reflective properties. In the 19th century, Leon Foucault silvered the mirrors within his telescopes. ![]() Later, more modern telescopes also started to feature other alterations to their lenses and mirrors to help produce a clearer, more accurate image. When light travels through a regular ‘chromatic’ lens, it is fractured into its constituent colors – this is what caused the color distortion in other telescopes at the time.īy using an achromatic lens (which doesn’t separate the colors in light), Hall’s telescope was able to avoid these issues and produce a color-corrected image. This issue persisted into the 18th century, until Chester Moore Hall developed an achromatic lens for his telescope. This further enhanced the image in the telescope, improving its quality and distance.Ĭolor was one of the biggest challenges with telescopes, as the refracted and reflected images observed through the telescope suffered from distorted altered colors. Later that century, in 1672, Laurent Cassegrain added a second, convex mirror to his telescope design. Newton’s telescope (also known as the Herschel Reflecting Telescope) allowed users to get a much clearer, color-corrected image with a further zoom. This reduced the amount of refraction caused by glass lenses, which cleared up the image and helped reduce color distortion created by refraction. Isaac Newton developed the first reflecting telescope in 1668.īy including a small, flat mirror in the telescope, Newton was able to reflect the light coming into the telescope. Over the next century, various astronomers and physicists improved and refined Lipperhey’s and Galileo’s designs to create a far better instrument without the limits of its earlier iterations. Since their invention in the early 17th century, telescopes have changed in a variety of ways, from their design and functions to their purposes. ![]() Many people mistakenly believe that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the inventor of the telescope while he may not have been the first person to make a telescope, Galileo was the first person to point it towards the stars.Īfter learning about Lipperhey’s device “for seeing things far away as if they were nearby” (as Lipperhey described it in his patent), Galileo created his own improved version of the telescope that he used to observe the planets and stars in the solar system. This telescope was fairly primitive, consisting of a tube with several concave and convex glass lenses inside, that could magnify an image by 3-4 times its size.ĭespite being relatively unimpressive by today’s standards, early telescopes were sensational due to the possible functions they could offer. The first telescope ever recorded was made in 1608CE, by the Dutch spectacle-maker Hans Lipperhey. This allows them to zoom farther while maintaining a high-quality image, free from blurring or distortion. Most modern telescopes still use mirrors, but these can now be perfectly engineered and treated to make them extra-reflective and have a better focus. ![]() While telescopes that use mirrors are the most common, there are still telescopes that use glass lenses instead – these are known as reflecting telescopes and refractive telescopes, respectively. They did this through the use of mirrors the inside of a telescope contains several small, curved mirrors that reflect and magnify an image.Įarly telescopes didn’t use mirrors, and instead used curved pieces of glass called lenses to focus on a distant image. Traditionally, telescopes were cylindrical hand-held devices that could be used to view objects a large distance away. If you aren’t familiar with telescopes or never really wondered how they work, it can be tricky to understand the ins and outs of telescopes. First things first – we need to cover the basics. ![]()
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