Reflecting Telescopes | And What They Do!

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Reflecting telescopes were first put forward by the Italian professor Niccolò Zucchi in the year1616.It was a tremendous achievement for that era and revolutionized the world of science and technology. For the first time researchers were able to see the sky in detail and the reflecting telescope revealed quite a few mysteries to the wonder-struck scientists.

The first telescopes were innovated by Galileo, and were made up of lenses placed strategically in a tube. The major drawback of the time was Niccolo’s inability to get the proper shape for the concave mirror and a process for seeing the picture without blocking the main mirror! As a result Zucchi’s design did not meet with a lot of interest even though it was extremely feasible. In 1663 James Gregory who wrote the Optica Promota innovated an extremely sensible design of the same reflecting telescope using Niccolo’s basis to go one step further. He used two concave mirrors but still building the telescope proved to be really difficult. 10 years scientist Robert Hooke was the only scientist able to make a working design but it wasn’t really popular.

Newton was the first to notice that when light was passing through lenses of differing thicknesses, the light beam bent and different colors bent according to different amounts. This property of bending light was called as refraction. But unfortunately after the beam of white light was bent back to its original destination, the picture achieved was surrounded a soft spectrum or nimbus of colors which was not supposed to be there. This defect was called as the chromatic aberration, was one of the major errors of telescopes found during Newton’s time. Sir Isaac Newton added the smaller “oblique” mirror placed near the primary mirror to get the best image for viewing the 90° angle and the reflecting telescope was born.

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