Primary Function of Telescopes
Telescopes primarily enhance the brightness of celestial objects, allowing us to see fainter stars and galaxies rather than just making them appear larger.
Types of Telescopes
Reflecting Telescopes: Use concave mirrors to focus light and produce images.
Refracting Telescopes: Use lenses to bend light and create images.
Features of Telescopes
The ability to collect light, which is crucial for observing distant objects.
A logarithmic scale measuring brightness; lower values indicate brighter objects.
Aperture Importance
A larger aperture allows a telescope to gather more light, improving the visibility of faint objects.
Comparative Size: For example, a typical toy telescope can collect 118.5 times more light than the human eye.
Why Telescopes Are Set Up on Mountains
Higher altitudes have less air turbulence, resulting in clearer images.
Mountain setups allow telescopes to achieve better resolution than those at lower elevations.
Limits to Telescopes
Size Constraints: Large mirrors are prone to sagging under their weight, limiting their size to around 8.5 meters.
Complexity of Design: Innovations like segmented mirrors help manage size limitations while maintaining image quality.
Advanced Telescopes Around the World
Large Binocular Telescope (LBT): Features two 8.4-meter mirrors, located in Arizona, USA.
Extremely Large Telescope (ELT): Under construction in Chile, expected completion in 2028, designed for advanced observations.
Andromeda Galaxy
It is the closest cluster of constellations near the “Milky Way” and can be seen with clear eyes in the sky.
The Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away from Earth.
This galaxy is also named “Messier 31 (M31)” or “NGC 224”.
It is a barred spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way.
Contains trillions of stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy is visible to the naked eye from Earth in dark skies, without a telescope. It appears as a faint, fuzzy patch
Some stars, like V762 Cas, can be significantly brighter than the Sun yet appear dim due to their distance.
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