How do reflecting telescopes work for kids

Our brains work out how big an object is by analyzing the angle of the light rays from it as the rays enter our eyes. Telescopes use lenses or minors to change this angle. Bending light rays from distant objects makes them seem larger than they would appear to the naked eye. Make a refracting telescope: Desk lamp, thick red paper, marker pen, scissors, tape, two magnifying glasses, nonhardening modeling material. STEP 1 Draw a circle around the font of the desk lamp on a sheet of purple paper.

Cut it out. Then cut out an arrow in the middle. Stick the circle onto the front of the lamp. STEP 2 Set up the desk lamp and mirror so that the mirror reflects the light from the lamp onto a nearby wall. Use modeling material to help support the mirror, if necessary.

STEP 3 Set up the magnifying glass, so that light reflecting from the mirror passes through it. The lens magnifies and focuses the light, projecting an upside-down arrow. STEP 1 Draw around the front of the desk lamp on a sheet of red paper. In , Sir Isaac Newton built the first reflecting telescope in order to prove his theory that white light had a spectrum of colors. Up to that point, telescopes were refracting and used a lens which worked much like the prisms Newton was using. This coloring is called chromatic aberration and it causes fringe coloring, so that images look blurred.

His new improved telescope eliminated chromatic aberration, was cheaper to build, simpler in design, had a wider field of view, and was portable. In in England, William Herschel built the first giant reflector telescope, which was 12 meters long. Over the next years, there have been astronomical advances, but all of the telescopes have two things in common: they have light gathering abilities and they magnify.

It was completed in and had a foot diameter radio dish that could be aimed into the sky. The first, or primary, mirror has a wide, concave shape, so its surface curves inward, collecting a lot of light quickly to form an image. The wider the mirror, the more light can be collected, making far-away, faint objects possible to see in more detail.

The mirror reflects and focuses the light to the secondary mirror. The flat second mirror reflects the light from the first mirror, but it is smaller so that the real image can form to be easily viewed with an eyepiece. The eyepiece is a lens that views an image in the same way as a magnifying glass. The amount the image is enlarged depends on the power of the eyepiece lens.