Reflecting vs Refracting TelescopesDistant galaxies, exploding stars and glowing nebulas. With just our eyes, we would not be able to see such things. A telescope is an optical instrument that helps us observe far away objects through electromagnetic radiation.
Scientists have been able to see into the depths of outer space for the past 400 years. Telescopes all work in very similar ways and do the same job. Reflecting telescopes use mirrors while refracting telescopes use glass lenses to view things remote from Earth.A reflecting telescope is the most common type of telescope. It is also called a Newtonian telescope after Isaac Newton, the man who invented it.
The Newtonian telescope has a tube that is open at one end. Light through electromagnetic radiation enters this tube and then is reflected off a curved mirror and the opposite end of the tube. It is then bounced back up to the tube to a smaller mirror near the top and bounces the light out of the hole where you attach the eyepiece at the side of the telescope. Reflecting telescopes’ mirror can be fixed onto a metal plate so it would not move around, they are much bigger than refracting telescopes, are cheaper to make and do not suffer from spherical aberration. On the other hand, they the maintenance of having one is very often and very costly as cleaned periodically and then has to be realigned properly otherwise the image would seem blurry if not done so.
Refracting telescopes, similar to how binoculars work, use glass lenses to collect and focus on light. The light that enters the telescope through the front lens is the objective lense, this light then travels down the telescope to the eyepiece lenses where the magnifying takes place. By bending light through the lens an image is formed. We can see things further away closer and bigger. As the tube of the telescope is sealed from both sides, the possibility of dirt getting into the telescope is very little, the images produced by refracting telescopes are much more steady and sharper as air does not move inside the tube as it is closed. The negative of using this type of telescope is that the image sometimes might be very faint because most of the light bounces off the lens and magnifying the object requires a larger lense which can be very hard to do.Both reflecting and refracting telescopes at the end do the same job all telescopes were build to do, observe objects that are isolated from us. Both focus on visible light through electromagnetic radiation and from this form a clear and well defined image.
Reflecting and refracting telescopes are both optical telescopes and are used mostly to look at the night sky to see any distant objects in space. In both telescopes, the larger the lense or the mirror, the more light is reflected and the more sharper the image is to us.The contrasts between the two telescopes range from both using different lenses, the reflecting telescope uses mirrors while the refracting telescope uses glass lenses. The images is visible to us after the telescope bends the light in order for it to reach our eyes while in reflecting telescopes the light bounces off of mirrors to reach our eyes through the eyepiece.
Reflecting telescopes also are the largest optical telescopes and can be supported from below or behind the mirror whereas the lenses on the refracting telescope cannot. The lens of a refracting telescope contorts different wavelengths of light in different ways, which can result in you seeing seeing strange colours around bright objects. A reflector suffers from chromatic aberration in telescopes with concave mirrors that don’t bring all the light together on a flat focal point. You can see the effects of chromatic aberration as “comet-shaped” rays around bright objects.The cost for both telescopes is another thing that is very disparate as lenses are much more expensive to make and purchase than mirrors as it is very difficult to make larger lenses that are able to bend.
Mirrors rest on a support and have no limit in size and because how much light the telescope will capture depends on the size of the lens or mirror, its cheaper and easier to find a larger reflector. To sum it all up, both reflecting and refracting telescopes have one final job and goal, even though they are both a compromise with their advantages and disadvantages, to view distant objects and make them seem nearer and larger to you whether it be through the refraction of light or the reflecting off of mirrors. The creation and evolution of telescopes made us able to see the comets, planets and clusters of galaxies.
