![refractor telescope refractor telescope](https://frostydrew.org/graphics/courses/refractor.gif)
First, for anyone studying the solar system, aperture really isn't that important. So should every telescope have the biggest aperture and longest focal length possible? This is not always necessary.
Refractor telescope full#
By reflecting light between multiple mirrors, the light still travels the full focal length. Since reflectors use mirrors, they can be shorter than their focal length. That means the tube has to be at least as long as the focal length. But a longer focal length also gives a higher possible magnification.
Refractor telescope Patch#
The longer the focal length, the smaller the patch of sky you're observing. The focal length is the length from the aperture to the focal point of the telescope. Telescopes in big observatories can have apertures of 10 metres or more! But optical telescopes rarely have apertures smaller than 8 centimetres. This aperture is only ever a few millimetres large. Your eye has an aperture, too: your pupil.
![refractor telescope refractor telescope](https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0049309/400wm/C0049309-Refractor_Telescope.jpg)
The bigger the aperture, the more light can enter the telescope. The aperture is the diameter of the opening on the front of a telescope. The size of the aperture of a telescope is very important. Telescopes have a few ways of making those far away objects look brighter and clearer. The dimmest objects in the universe don't give us a lot of light to work with. Why are telescopes in observatories so big? That’s why people have been able to build very large reflecting telescopes. Remember how we said lenses in a refractor telescope would be heavy? Well, mirrors are less heavy than lenses. Path of light rays through a reflecting telescope (©2019 Let’s Talk Science based on an image by Krishnavedala via Wikimedia Commons). These lenses can be adjusted to focus the image. In a refractor, the eyepiece may contain several lenses. It’s a piece you put in the telescope to look through with your eye. The eyepiece is exactly what it sounds like. Modern refractors have a second tube that contains the eyepiece or ocular lens. In other words, it’s the lens at the end where the light comes in. What are the parts of a telescope?Ī refractor is made up of a long tube containing lenses. Their lenses would be very heavy and their tubes would need to be very long. Most modern observatories use reflectors because their telescopes are so huge. Reflectors, on the other hand, use mirrors instead of lenses to reflect light. It's the type of long telescope which you might imagine old-time astronomers, like Galileo, using. reflecting telescopes, also known as reflectorsĪ refractor uses lenses within a tube to refract (bend) light.refracting telescopes, also known as refractors.If you were looking to buy a telescope for yourself, you would learn that there are two basic designs: Let's consider a basic optical telescope. The world's largest refracting telescope is the Yerkes Observatory 40-inch Refractor (Source: Kb9vrg via Wikimedia Commons).