Telescope facts for kids
A telescope is an important tool for astronomy that gathers light and directs it to a single point. Some do this with curved mirrors, some with curved lenses, and some with both. Telescopes make distant things look bigger, brighter and closer. Galileo was the first person to use a telescope for astronomy, but he did not invent them. The first telescope was invented in the Netherlands in 1608. Some telescopes, not mainly used for astronomy, are binoculars, camera lenses, or spyglasses.
When telescopes are used with just your eye, an eyepiece has to be used. These use two or more smaller lenses to magnify an image. Without an eyepiece, an eye can not focus the image. When a telescope is used with a camera or other special scientific tools, eyepiece lenses are not needed.
Most big telescopes for astronomy are made for looking very carefully at things that are already known. A few are made to search for things, such as unknown asteroids. A telescope made to be used with a camera instead of just your eye are sometimes called "astrographs".
Telescopes can be used by normal people too, not just scientists. These are amateur telescopes, and they are usually smaller, and they don't cost too much for a normal person to buy. Some of the most popular amateur telescopes are Dobsonians, a type of Newtonian telescope.
The word telescope is usually used for light human eyes can see, but there are telescopes for wavelengths we cannot see. Infrared telescopes look like normal telescopes, but have to be kept cold since all warm things give off infrared light. Radio telescopes are like radio antennas, usually shaped like large dishes.
X-ray and Gamma ray telescopes have a problem because the rays go through most metals and glasses. To solve this problem, the mirrors are shaped like a bunch of rings inside each other so the rays strike them at a shallow angle and are reflected. These telescopes are space telescopes because little of this radiation reaches the Earth. Other space telescopes are put in orbit so the Earth's atmosphere does not interfere.
Telescopes are mostly used for looking at celestial objects such as, the stars, planets, etc.
Related pages
Images for kids
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The 100 inch (2.54 m) Hooker reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, USA
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The 60 inch Hale debuted in 1908
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The "onion" dome at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich housing a 28-inch refracting telescope with a remaining segment of William Herschel's 120-centimetre (47 in) diameter reflecting telescope (called the "40-foot telescope" due to its focal length) in the foreground.
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The primary mirror assembly of James Webb Space Telescope under construction. This is a segmented mirror and its coated with Gold to reflect (orange-red) visible light, through near-infrared to the mid-infrared
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Modern telescopes typically use CCDs instead of film for recording images. This is the sensor array in the Kepler spacecraft.
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50 cm aperture refracting telescope at Nice Observatory
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A modern-day 8-meter reflector's dome open for night-time observations
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The Very Large Array at Socorro, New Mexico, United States.
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Einstein Observatory was a space-based focusing optical X-ray telescope from 1978.
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The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory is released into orbit by the Space Shutte in 1991, and it would operate until the year 2000
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The reflectors of HEGRA detect flashes of light in the atmosphere, thus detecting high energy particles
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Six views of the Crab nebula supernova remnant, viewed at different wavelengths of light by various telescopes
See also
In Spanish: Telescopio para niños
