Oct 29, 2025 · This article describes the operating principles and historical development of optical telescopes. For explanation of instruments that operate in other portions of the electromagnetic …

Oct 29, 2025 · His telescope had greater reflecting power than Rosse’s, and it enabled him to catalog 600 new nebulae as well as to discover several satellites of the outer planets — Triton (Neptune ’s …

Oct 29, 2025 · The most important of all the powers of an optical telescope is its light-gathering power. This capacity is strictly a function of the diameter of the clear objective—that is, the aperture—of the …

Oct 29, 2025 · These guide telescopes have low magnification and a wide field of view, the latter being a desirable attribute for finding stars or other remote cosmic objects.

The first telescopes focused visible light by refraction through lens es; later instruments used reflection from curved mirrors (see optics). Their invention is traditionally credited to Hans Lippershey …

Oct 18, 2025 · Because radio telescopes operate at much longer wavelengths than do optical telescopes, radio telescopes need to be much larger than optical telescopes to achieve the same …

Oct 29, 2025 · In 1930 Bernhard Schmidt, an optician at the Hamburg Observatory in Bergedorf, Germany, designed a catadioptric telescope that satisfied the requirement of photographing larger …

3 days ago · Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the first sophisticated optical observatory placed into orbit around Earth. Earth’s atmosphere obscures ground-based astronomers’ view of celestial objects by …

An optical telescope consists of two main elements: the objective, which focuses light rays together to form an image of a distant object, and the eyepiece, which acts like a magnifying glass to provide an …

Since gamma rays have so much energy, they pass right through the mirror of a standard optical telescope. Instead, gamma rays are detected by the optical flashes they produce when interacting …