A Telescope
Optical Telescope:
An optical telescope offers:
- enhanced light-gathering power, enabling the observation of fainter objects compared to the naked eye
- improved angular resolution, allowing for greater detail to be discerned in observed objects.
Light Gathering
Light from a star falls as a steady stream of photons striking the ground with a certain number of photons per unit area per second. The human eye can only see the photons that directly strike it eyes when looking straight at a star.
A telescope provides us with a large collecting area to intercept as much of the beam of incoming photons as possible, and then has the optics to focus those photons on the eye, or a camera, or onto some detector.
Telescope Types: