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Telescopes. Amateur and Professional. Galileo 1609. The Moon as a World. Jupiter has Moons. Refracting telescopes. Long focus refractors were awkward but suffered less from chromatic aberration. Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope. Mirrors do not have chromatic aberration.
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Telescopes Amateur and Professional
Long focus refractors were awkward but suffered less from chromatic aberration
Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope Mirrors do not have chromatic aberration
Reflecting telescope Objective mirrors instead of lenses
Three Powers • Magnifying • Resolving • Light Gathering
Magnifying Power • Ability to make objects appear larger in angular size • One can change the magnifying power of a telescope by changing the eyepiece used with it • Mag Power = focal length of objective divided by the focal length of the eyepiece
Resolving Power • Ability to see fine detail • Depends on the diameter of the objective lens or mirror
Light Gathering Power • The ability to make faint objects look brighter • Depends on the area of the objective lens or mirror • Thus a telescope with an objective lens 2 inches in diameter has 4 times the light gathering power of a telescope with a lens 1 inch in diameter
Refracting telescopes Lick Vienna
Yerkes Observatory Largest refracting telescope with a one meter objective
20th century Large Reflectors Come of Age Mount Wilson Observatory 1.5m (1908) and 2.5m (1918)
4 meter Reflecting telescope
Dome of 4 meter Kitt Peak
SOAR Telescope 4.1 meter
Boller & Chivens reflecting telescope with a 24-inch objective mirror
More on resolution • Eagle-eyed Dawes • The Dawes Limit R = 4.56/D Where R = resolution in seconds of arc D = diameter of objective in inches More appropriate for visible light and small telescopes
A more general expression for the theoretical resolving power • Imagine that star images look like Airy disks
Minimum Angle that can be resolved • R = 1.22 x 206,265 l / d R = resolution in seconds of arc l = wavelength of light d = diameter of the objective lens or mirror Note that the wavelength of light and the diameter of the objective should be in the same units
Examples • For Visible light around 500nm Our 24-inch telescope R = 0.20 seconds This may be compared with the Dawes limit of 0.19 seconds But with large ground-based telescopes it is difficult to achieve this
Astronomical “seeing” • Blurring effect of looking through air • Causes stars to twinkle and planetary detail to blur • At the SOAR site: good seeing means stellar images better than about 0.7 seconds of arc • In Michigan, good seeing means better than about 3 seconds of arc • Not to be confused with good transparency
Bad seeing on this side Good seeing on this side
Radio telescope resolution • = 1m d = 100m R = 2500 seconds = 42 minutes! Even though radio telescopes are much bigger, their resolving power is much worse than for optical telescopes Interferometric arrays get around this
Interferometry Size of array = 10 km for a VLA This becomes the effective d Now R becomes 25 secsec for a 1-m wavelength For VLBI (very long baseline interfeormetry) the d = 10,000km and R = 0.025 seconds
Observing from space • No clouds • Perfect seeing • Can see wavelengths of light blocked by the earth’s atmosphere