He didn’t after all, discover moons around Jupiter like Galileo did, or plot the return of a comet like Halley did. The real genius of Newton’s TelescopeĪll of that stuff is remarkable but there is something much more important in Newton’s Astronomy and in his telescope.
It was Newton’s telescope that worked really well and that brought the art and science of reflectors into the world of science. But while Zucchi did make some new discoveries with his telescope it didn’t work well and was difficult to make and to use. Zucchi created his first reflector around 1616 while Newton completed his first (and famous) telescope in 1670. He published a book on Optics in the 1650’s and it is this book that inspired Sir Isaac Newton to build his own telescope. Credit for making the first reflector goes to and Italian Monk, Physicist, and Astronomer named Niccolo Zucchi. It is commonly thought that Newton invented the first reflector telescope but it isn’t true. This way you can build much larger mirrors without any distortion. And because you only need to bounce light off the surface you can place the whole mirror on a supporting structure or base which takes a lot of the weight off the mirror. It simply bounces all the light off the surface. Newton’s telescope solved these problems. When a lens gets to be really large it gets very heavy and its own weight will distort the lens and ruin the image. Today we can make lenses that have almost no chromatic aberration but we can’t make them very large. In the time of Newton glass making and lens making was very primitive and the problems of chromatic aberration were not yet overcome. This is called chromatic aberration and it gives us distorted views of what we see through a lens. When light passes through glass the different bands (or colors) pass through at different angles and this causes aberrations or problems in the images. If you are familiar with a prism or a rainbow you can understand why reflectors are superior to refractors. Why a reflector is better than a refractor There are currently several reflector type scopes that are over four hundred inches in diameter. The largest refractor telescope in the world is forty inches in diameter and reflector telescopes dwarf this in comparison.
Reflector telescopes, because they are easier to make and can be made in sizes much larger than refractors, are an invention that changed astronomy and our understanding of the universe. This article looks at his famous reflector telescope and describes some of his discoveries.Ī reflector telescope is one that uses a mirror rather than lenses to bend light and magnify images. There is a lot of validity to this claim.
Sir Isaac Newton is often considered as the greatest Astronomer and Mathematician to ever live. Sir Isaac Newton didn’t use his telescope to find any new things in the universe but he did use it to radically transform how we view the world we live in and the universe as a whole.
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