Telescopes could be defined as instruments used for collecting radiation from distant objects.
A telescope could be a metallic mesh…,
a patterned glass slab…,
or even a tank filled with 50,000 tons of distilled water.
As interesting as those might be, in common use (and from this point on in this post) ‘telescopes’ refer to optical telescopes, primarily the ones used ordinarily for viewing the night-sky.
One way of broadly classifying these are as follows:
The most commonly used telescopes are of three types
One way of broadly classifying these are as follows:
- Refracting telescopes (these use lenses for magnification)
- Reflecting telescopes (these use mirrors)
- Catadioptric telescopes (these use a combination of lenses and mirrors)
The most commonly used telescopes are of three types
- Newtonian telescope - this is a reflecting telescope with two popular subtypes Newtonian reflectors and Dobsonians.
- Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope - this is a catadioptric telescope
- Coude telescope - this is a reflecting telescope in which the construction of the telescope helps with directing the light to a spectrograph