While we have no physical evidence, we have very strong documentation that refracting telescopes were used in England as early as the sixteenth century.

The use of Refracting Telescopes became widespread in the early seventeenth century in the Netherlands.

Invention of Refracting Telescopes:

Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen of the Netherlands claim the invention of the original Refracting Telescopes. This original scope had both concave and convex lenses so that the image would not be inverted. After the Netherlands started producing them, they were rapidly found all over Europe.

In 1609, Galileo was visiting Venice and claims to have solved the problems with the telescope by using a convex lens in one end and a concave in the other end.

Thus, moving the two pieces of glass further away from each other, this led to better image viewing with less rainbow effects around the distant object. Galileo spent much of his time to perfecting the telescope after that.

His first telescope magnified at a power of three diameters, and the best one he made magnified at a diameter of thirty-three diameters.

In 1680, Isaac Newton developed one of the first reflecting telescopes. There was a problem wit the images having a rainbow of color surrounding them.

So instead of using a lens to focus light, Newton tried a small curved metal mirror in the back of the telescope.

He also made a discovery in 1666 about the light of colors. Newton figured out that the scope’s problems were due to the color spectrum much more than the shape of the mirrors.

He also concluded that refraction of light couldn’t be replicated without color. John Hadley developed a telescope that used parabolic mirrors in 1722.

These types of Reflecting Telescopes are great for viewing comets, nebulae, star clusters, and other galaxies.

Reflecting Telescopes offer a wider field of view than refracting telescopes do. These have short focal ratios and lower magnification.

They are relatively cheap to make at home. The only problem is you have to keep the mirrors clean and in line. If you grind the mirror wrong, it will distort your images.

Since the scopes will have a huge light focusing ability, you will be able to view deep sky objects as well as take pictures of what you are seeing.

Materials that you will need to make your own telescope: Magnifying glass, Masking tape, Flashlight, Thin piece of paper, a pair of reading glass with low numbers, yardstick and an assistant.

Start to make your own telescope:

Tape the reading glasses to the yardstick making sure one lens is out on the side.

Place the flashlight on a stand about twelve feet away. Shine the light at the lens that is sticking out.

Place the thin sheet of paper on the side across from the flashlight. Walk away from the paper until you see a small picture of the flashlight on the paper.

Tell your assistant take the paper to the focal point. Go around to the back side of the paper and check the image in your magnifying glass. Adjust until the image from the flashlight is enlarged.

Take the paper away and keep looking thought the eyepiece or lens. The image will be brighter since the paper was removed.

Look at other sundry items near the flashlight. Move the eyepiece or lens up and down or side to side to get a good image.

The LBT or Large Binocular Telescope is the world’s most powerful optical telescope.

LBT will allow scientists to view planets and stars in our galaxy. It is housed in Arizona’s Mount Graham International Observatory.

The LBT is housed in a sixteen story structure, and the top ten floors of the structure rotate.

Construction of LBT:

A fifty-five ton mirror and its steel transport box were recently transported 122 miles to get to Arizona. There is the eighteen ton mirror which is made like borosilicate honeycomb.

The mirror was transported in November of 2003 to its final home. It took three days and plenty of planning for it to arrive unscathed.

The journey actually began when the mirror was spun cast in the giant rotating furnace back in 1997. The teams at the Mirror Lab have been creating new mirror technologies for the past twenty years.

After casting, it was polished using a stressed-lap technique. The parabolic face of the mirror is precisely one millionth of an inch over the entire mirror.

The mechanical parts were tested in Italy and shipped to Arizona. Partnerships all over the world helped to bring this telescope into being.

Conceptualized in 1946 and launched in 1990, the Hubble telescope orbits the Earth and sends pictures back that aren’t blurred by background light or the atmosphere.

The telescope was named after Edwin Hubble who made a great scientific breakthrough when he found that the universe was expanding.

Draw backs of Hubble telescope:

After the Hubble telescope was launched into space, one of the main mirrors was causing aberrations in the pictures being sent back to Earth. In 1993, a servicing mission was deemed necessary and they returned the Hubble telescope to its former capabilities.

Replacement of Hubble telescope with The James Webb Space Telescope:

Currently in 2007, several of the Hubble’s turning gyroscopes have failed, and its main camera stopped working.

There is a planned service mission scheduled for 2008 which will hopefully allow the telescope to function until 2013.

After that, a new telescope will be launched to take its place. The James Webb Space Telescope will be superior to the Hubble telescope in many ways, but will only record in infrared.

Challenging Hubble telescope creation:

Challenges were also part of the Hubble telescope’s creation. It would have to able to withstand direct passes by the sun and behind the earth. Temperatures in these areas were either extremely hot or extremely cold.

There are so many choices of telescopes out there. What do you buy and what do you really need? How to pick a telescope that meets your needs?

Here are a few things to keep in mind so you don’t buy a telescope that won’t meet what you need or want it to do. By reading this your doubt on how to pick a telescope will come to an end.

How to pick a telescope for your needs:

High power magnification is not always the primary consideration. You should have 40-60x magnification per 1 inch of aperture.

The scope’s ability to enlarge an image is dependent upon the lenses used and the focal length within the scope itself. Most objects can be seen at the lowest magnification because there is more light being focused.

What are to be considered in how to pick a telescope:

The most important feature to think about when thinking, how to pick a telescope is aperture.

Buy as much as you can afford. Remember, though, the biggest telescope is not always the best one.

Do you know how telescopes work, want to know how telescopes work then read this.

Telescope is a device that allows us to bring distant objects closer to us so that we can study them. A good example is the many planets, galaxies, and stars in outer space.

Some range from $1 at the toy store to the $1.2 billion Hubble Telescope. There are two types of telescopes.

Refractors use a glass lens. Reflectors use mirrors instead of a lens.

How telescopes work:

Let’s take the different pieces of a microscope and see how they work.

The objective lens in a Refractor or primary mirror in Reflectors gathers incoming light and brings it to a focus.

The eyepiece takes that same light and magnifies it to take up a large part of the retina of the eye. Thus, it takes a small image and spreads it out to make it look bigger.

There are two general principles on how telescopes work:

One is how well it can collect light. The other is the magnification of the image you are viewing. Collecting light is related directly to the diameter of the lens. The more light collected, the brighter the image.

It seems all the technology in the history of the telescopes started back in 2560 BC.

Artisans in ancient Egypt polished rocks, glass, and semi-precious stones to make eyes for the sarcophagi.

What follows is some major points in the history of the telescopes and how they came to be today.

History of the telescopes:

• In 470 BC, Mozi, a Chinese philosopher, focused the sun’s rays by using concave mirrors.
• In 4 BC, Seneca the Younger used water to magnify letters and words.
• In 23, Pliny the Elder discovered doctors using a crystal ball with the sun’s rays beaming through it to cauterize wounds.
• In the ninth century, telescopes were possibly made from Visby lenses, a Middle Eastern glass.
• In 1520, Leonard Digges, an English mathematician, invented two telescopes – Reflecting and Refracting.
• In 1608, A Dutch lensmaker, Hans Lippershey, applied for a patent on a design for a telescope.
• In 1609, Galileo improved on Lippershey’s design and renamed it “perspicillum” - An Italian word for telescope.
• In 1616, Niccolo Zucchi invented a reflecting telescope.
• In 1663, James Gregory, a Scottish mathematician, produces a telescope with a parabolic primary mirror and an elliptical secondary mirror.

Globular clusters are defined as a dense grouping of thousands to millions of stars.

Globular Clusters are comprised of young stars at millions of years old to older stars at billions of years old. The stars in these Globular Clusters are usually very tightly bound together.

What exactly are Globular Clusters?

They are considered deep sky objects. They are easily found in the night sky in the hours before midnight in the months of April through September.

They appear in your telescope as concentrated patches of gray mist. The amazing part is the average distance between any of the given stars is between ¾ to 1 ½ light years.

The most spectacular of all Globular Clusters is the NGC 5139.

You can see it with your naked eye because it is three times the moon’s diameter. There are millions of stars that take up your viewfinder. It is truly a wondrous site to behold. If you live in or around North Carolina close to the latitude of +36 degrees, you will be able to spot it easily in the night sky.

Globular Clusters such as these are very common. In the Milky Way, there are 150 known Globular Clusters.

Rumors of a Dutchman creating a device that would bring objects closer so you could see them more clearly reached Galileo in 1609. With that inspiration he created Galileo’s Telescope.

He started using the device after he refined it to a 10-power telescope and made some amazing discoveries with Galileo’s Telescope.

Discoveries with Galileo’s Telescope:

In 1610, he looked around Jupiter to find three satellites all in a straight line. When he looked back, they were in all directions. He surmised they were orbiting Jupiter and that, if this were true, then the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. This theory went against what the church taught.

The church believed Galileo to be quite wrong. They said everything he could see in his new telescopic device went against everything the Bible said.

Galileo argued that even the interpreters of the Bible could have made a mistake in the interpretation. He was accused of heresy, but proclaimed innocent and told not to teach any of the Copernican belief system.

Unbeknownst to the church, Galileo continued to study Jupiter and the movements of its moons with Galileo’s telescope. He also started working on a paper about the ocean’s tides.