#Who invented the telescope series#

(Image: Godfrey Kneller/Public domain)īuilding very large refractive telescopes quickly proved prohibitively challenging. Isaac Newton is credited with the invention of the first reflecting telescope. Combined, this creates an image that looks slightly blurry to us, thanks to light with different wavelengths focusing in slightly different spots. This happens because light’s index of refraction-how severely it bends when passing from air into a denser medium, like glass-depends on its wavelength or color.īlue light bends more as it passes through glass, and therefore will come to a focused point at a different place along the optical axis relative to red light. To take just one example, light at different wavelengths focuses at different points, a phenomenon known as chromatic aberration. The optics of refraction also introduce several substantial challenges when admiring the image from a refracting telescope.

#Who invented the telescope series#

This article comes directly from content in the video series Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy. Lenses can only be supported at their edges so that nothing will block the light passing through the glass, and for large lenses, the very weight of the glass itself will distort the lens as it sags and succumbs to gravity. The glass can’t have any imperfections or bubbles, and even gravity becomes an enemy. Engineering perfect large lenses is extremely difficult. When it comes to building telescopes, however, size quickly becomes an incredible challenge. The ability of these mirrors to capture bright, sharp images allows us to see better and farther into space-similar to the way a large telephoto lens used by wildlife and sports photographers allows them to get sharp, close-up images of distant animals or athletes.

A big lens or mirror can also better focus that light into a sharper image. For both of these goals, larger telescopes are better.Ī big lens or mirror can collect much more light from dim objects. Telescopes need to produce images of distant objects that are both bright and sharp. To understand why the small spyglasses of the 17th century have evolved into the enormous building-sized telescopes of today, we need to understand the two main goals of a good telescope. Lippershey may have kicked off the invention of the telescope, but when considering the telescopes we use today, there is arguably no better person to credit as the father of the modern telescope than a man named George Ellery Hale. The first telescope invented by Hans Lippershey was a small tube with two lenses at either end.

The starkest differences between the two types of telescope designs are, first, their glass elements: instead of using lenses to refract light, Keck-and most modern telescopes-uses mirrors to reflect and focus light and, second, their size-the Keck telescope’s main mirror is 10 meters across or nearly 33 feet in diameter! At a glance, it might seem utterly unrecognizable, but we can identify a common element between the two: light is focused and magnified by curved pieces of glass set in a line. This is one of the Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The principal was simple and elegant, but refractive telescopes like this are only rarely used today.Ĭompare the first refractive telescopes to one of the most powerful telescopes today. Used famously by Galileo, they looked like something a pirate might press to their eye in a Hollywood movie: a small tube with two lenses at either end using the power of refraction, the bending of light as it passes through something like a piece a glass, to magnify distant objects.

The early telescopes by Hans Lippershey were small spyglass-like objects held in an astronomer’s hands. (Image: Jebulon/Public domain) Comparing Telescopes Galileo Galilei is often mistaken as the first person to have invented the telescope.