telescope
telescope traditionally, a system of lenses, mirrors, or both, used to gather light from a distant object and form an image of it. Traditional optical telescopes, which are the subject of this article, also are used to magnify objects on earth and in astronomy; other types of astronomical telescopes gather radio waves (see radio astronomy ), X rays (see X-ray astronomy ), or infrared or ultraviolet radiation.
Types of Optical Telescopes
There are three major types of optical telescopes, classified according to the element that gathers and focuses the incoming light. In the refracting telescope, or refractor, light is bent, or refracted, as it passes through an objective lens. The objective lens is convex, i.e., thicker at the middle than the edges. Parallel light passing through the lens is refracted so that it converges to a point behind the lens, called the focus. The distance from the lens to the focus is called the focal length. In a reflecting telescope, or reflector, light is reflected by a concave mirror and brought to a focus in front of the mirror. If parallel light rays are to be reflected so that they converge to a single point, the mirror must be paraboloid in shape. Typically, a glass disk is ground to this shape and then coated with a thin layer of silver or aluminum to make it highly reflecting. The third type of telescope, the catadioptric system, focuses light by a combination of lenses and mirrors.
Images Produced by Optical Telescopes
The properties of the image produced by a telescope are similar, whether formed by lenses or mirrors. The real image produced is inverted; i.e., top and bottom are reversed, as are left and right. In a terrestrial refracting telescope used to view objects on the earth, an additional lens is used to invert the image a second time, so that objects appear as they do when viewed with the unaided eye; in an astronomical telescope, image inversion is unimportant and no lens is added to invert the image a second time. The angular size of an object as seen from the position of the telescope may be expressed in degrees or in radians (1 radian equals about 57°). The angle in radians determined by the object is given by the ratio of the object's diameter to its distance from the telescope. The size of the object's image is the product of this and the focal length of the image-forming lens or mirror. For example, the angular size of the moon's diameter is about 1/2 °, or roughly 1/100 radian; a telescope with a focal length of 60 in. (152 cm) would produce an image of the moon 0.6 in. (1.52 cm) in diameter. The brightness of the image depends on the total light gathered and hence is proportional to the area of the objective or the square of the diameter of the telescope.
Resolving and Magnifying Power
The resolution of the telescope is a measure of how sharply defined the details of the image can be. The laws of diffraction make a certain amount of blurring unavoidable, because of the wave nature of light. If two stars are very close, a given telescope may not be able to separate them into two distinct points. The smallest angular separation that can be unambiguously distinguished is called the resolving power of the telescope and is proportional to the ratio of the wavelength of light being observed to the diameter of the telescope. Thus, the larger the diameter, the smaller the minimum angular separation and the higher the resolving power.
The magnification, or power, of the telescope is relevant only when an eyepiece, or ocular, is used to magnify the image for visual inspection. The angular size of the virtual image seen by the observer will be larger than the actual angular size of the object. The ratio of these two sizes is the magnifying power and is equal to the ratio of the focal lengths of the objective and ocular. Any desired magnification can be obtained with a given telescope by the use of an appropriate ocular, but beyond a point determined by the resolving power, higher magnification will reveal no further details.
In addition to diffraction, other defects limit the performance of real optical systems. The most serious of these for lenses is chromatic aberration . Other defects include coma, astigmatism, distortion, and curvature of field. In general, it is easier to eliminate these faults in the reflector than in the refractor.
Arrangement of Mirrors in a Reflector
The prime focus of the reflector is inside the main tube of the telescope and thus the image cannot be observed there without blocking part of the incoming light. A variety of schemes are employed to divert the image to a more convenient location. The simplest of these, constituting the Newtonian reflector, is the placement of a flat secondary mirror in the path of the converging light just before the prime focus. The small secondary mirror, which blocks a negligible portion of the primary mirror, is tilted at an angle of 45° in order to reflect the convergent light at right angles and bring it to a focus outside the telescope tube. In the Cassegrain system, the secondary mirror is convex and reflects the convergent light directly back along the axis of the telescope through a hole in the center of the primary mirror. By causing light to traverse a longer path, the effective focal length is increased and a larger image is formed. The Gregorian system is similar to the Cassegrain, except that the secondary mirror is concave. The Coudé system uses both a convex secondary mirror and one or more diagonal flat mirrors to produce a focus outside the tube. The secondaries are arranged so that the position of the focus remains stationary as the telescope rotates, allowing the use of image-recording and analyzing devices that would be too heavy to mount directly on a moving telescope.
The Schmidt Telescope and Other Innovations
The Schmidt camera telescope, invented in 1930 by Bernard Schmidt, is a catadioptric system used for wide-angle photography of star fields. The primary mirror is spherical instead of paraboloidal, which requires that a special correcting lens be used on the front of the tube. The Maksutov telescope, invented by D. D. Maksutov in 1941, is similar in design and purpose to the Schmidt telescope but has a spherical meniscus in place of the correcting plate of the Schmidt.
Mounting the Telescope
Equal in importance to the mirrors and lenses constituting the optics of a telescope is the mounting of the telescope. The mounting must be massive, in order to minimize mechanical vibration that would blur the image, especially at high magnification or during long-exposure photography. At the same time, motion of the telescope must be precise and smooth. To allow the telescope to be pointed in any direction in the sky, the mounting must provide rotation about two perpendicular axes. In the altazimuth mounting, one axis points to the zenith and allows rotation along the horizon and the other allows changes in altitude, or distance above the horizon. This mounting is used for small terrestrial telescopes and, since the 1970s, most new astronomical telescopes use altazimuth mountings that are computer-driven in both axes. Before the 1970s, most astronomical telescopes used the equatorial mounting, in which one axis points at the celestial pole and hence is parallel to the earth's axis.
Evolution of Telescopes
Refracting Telescopes
The first practical telescopes were refracting telescopes produced at the beginning of the 17th cent. By 1610, Galileo had made extensive astronomical use of the simple refractor. The best telescopes of this period had very long focal lengths to minimize the chromatic aberration inherent in the single-element objective. The multielement objective, invented in 1733, allowed the construction of telescopes of large aperture. The art of building refracting telescopes reached a high point in the 19th cent. The largest refractor in existence, with an objective lens 40 in. (102 cm) in diameter, is located at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis. A 36-in. (91-cm) refractor is located at the Lick Observatory in California and a 33-in. (84-cm) refractor is located at Meudon, France. These telescopes represent the practical limit on the size of a refractor.
Reflecting Telescopes
Because a lens can be supported only at its edge, the weight of the lens itself produces unavoidable distortion in the shape. Because a mirror can be supported from behind, it can be much more massive without incurring distortion, and mirrors many feet in diameter have been constructed. The first reflecting telescope, built by Isaac Newton in 1672, had a mirror made of a metal alloy. When techniques for depositing metal films on glass surfaces were developed, reflecting telescopes became comparable in precision to refractors. An important advantage of the reflecting telescope is the absence of chromatic aberration. Because only one surface must be ground to an exact shape, the reflector is also easier to manufacture. Although increasingly larger mirrors provide increasingly greater light-gathering ability, the cost increases even more rapidly. Several innovations were introduced toward the end of the 20th cent. to achieve the goal of increasing light gathering more economically.
One of these innovations is the use of segmented or multimirror reflectors. The largest of these are the twin W. M. Keck telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatories , Hawaii. Each has a segmented primary mirror, composed of 36 separate hexagonal pieces. Each segment is about 72 in. (1.8 m) across but only 3 in. (76 mm) thick, creating a 394-in. (10-m) diameter primary mirror. The position of each 880-lb (400-kg) segment is computer controlled to a tolerance of less than one millionth of an inch. The 430-in. (11-m) primary mirror array of the Hobby-Eberly telescope at the McDonald Observatory, Tex., is made of 91 250-lb (113-kg) hexagonal segments. The revolutionary design, which resulted in an effective aperture of 362 in (9.2 m), enabled it to be constructed at 20% the cost of other 350-in (9-m class) telescopes.
Another technique for compensating for smaller mirrors is called optical interferometry. The signals from two or more smaller telescopes at separate locations are combined so that the resulting image is equal to that which would be received from a very large telescope, or virtual telescope . The largest of these installations is at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Completed in 2003, it comprises four 315-in. (8-m) fixed telescopes and several movable 72-in. (1.8-m) auxiliary telescopes, the images from which can be combined to provide the total resolving capability of a 630-in. (16-m) conventional reflecting telescope. Similar approaches to solving the problem of building a large reflector were the multiple-mirror telescope (MMT) at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory , Ariz., the COAST ( C ambridge O ptical A perture S ynthesis T elescope) system at the Univ. of Cambridge observatory, England, and the CHARA ( C enter for H igh A ngular R esolution A stronomy) Array at the Mount Wilson Observatory , Calif. The MMT, which became operational in 1979, consisted of six 72-in. (1.8-m) telescopes on a common mounting and having a resolving capability equal to that of a 176-in. (4.5-m) reflector of conventional design. It was replaced by a conventional 256-in. (6.5-m) single-mirror telescope in 1999. The COAST system, which became operational in 1996, combines light from a trio of small telescopes spaced about 20 ft (6 m) apart. The twin Keck telescopes, in domes a few hundred feet apart, have adaptive optics that make them equivalent in resolving power to a telescope with a mirror 280 ft (85 m) across. The CHARA Array, fully operational in 2002, consists of six 39-in. (1-m) aperture telescopes arranged in a Y-shape and contained in a 1,300-ft (400-m) diameter circle; the combined signals from the six telescopes provide the equivalent of the resolving capability of a telescope 1,080 ft (330 m) wide.
The largest single-mirror reflecting optical telescopes are the 327-in. (8.3-m) Subaru telescope, formerly called the Japanese National Large Telescope, at the Mauna Kea Observatories and the Gemini North telescope (320 in./8.1 m), also at Mauna Kea, and its twin, the Gemini South telescope, at Cerro Pachon, Chile. Other large conventional optical telescopes include those at the Special Astrophysical Observatory near Zelenchukskaya, in the Caucasus (236 in./6 m), the world's largest solid-mirror optical telescope; Palomar Observatory (see under Palomar Mountain ), Calif. (200 in./5 m); the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory , Chile, and the Kitt Peak National Observatory , Ariz. (158 in./4 m each); the European Southern Observatory , Chile (142 in./3.6 m); Lick Observatory , Calif. (120 in./3 m); and McDonald Observatory , Tex. (107 in./2.7 m). Large Schmidt telescopes are at Palomar, Siding Spring Observatory , Australia, and the European Southern Observatory. The Hubble Space Telescope is a 94.5-in. (2.4-m) reflector.
Bibliography
See H. G. J. Rutten and M. A. M. Van Venrooij, Telescope Optics: Evaluation and Design (1988); R. N. Wilson, Reflecting Telescope Optics: Basic Design Theory and Its Historical Development (1996); R. Moore, Eyes on the Universe: The Story of the Telescope (1997); S. F. Tonkin et al., Amateur Telescope Making (1998); J. B. Zirker, An Acre of Glass: A History and Forecast of the Telescope (2005).
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