Essay on Astronomy Lab

400 Years of the Telescope

400 Years of the Telescope is a comprehensive historical documentary of the telescope; starting with invention of the telescope up to what the future holds for it. The inventor being somewhat debated, the documentary starts with Galileo turning the invention to the heavens and making the first close up studies of the sky. We learn the discrepancies between the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories, and how they explained the planet’s retrograde motion. The documentary then turns to the technological advances of the telescope since its invention 400 years ago. It started as a simple refracting lens in a long tube, evolved into the enormous reflecting telescopes, and eventually became an orbiting satellite called the Hubble Telescope. The documentary then turned to some of the numerous discoveries made possible by the telescope. Most of the advancements in the study of the expanding universe, distant stars, and exoplanets are all due to the powerful telescopes that we have today. In conclusion, the film alludes to what the future holds in store for the once simple idea. The documentary revealed the plans for football-field-sized telescopes being built in Chile and discussed the not-so-distant future that has an Internet database of professional telescope data that anyone with a computer can access. 400 Years of the Telescope illustrated the profound effect that the invention of the telescope has had on science and showed a really intriguing possibility for the future.
I found the series of technological advances in the design of the telescope pretty interesting. Hans Lippershey invented the reflecting telescope by applying the same ideas used in bifocals. This design had many drawbacks, including size constraints and chromatic aberration. To solve these shortcomings of the refracting telescope, Sir Isaac Newton created the reflecting telescope. In this draft of the telescope, light is reflected from a parabolic shaped mirror, to a flat second mirror, and then finally to the viewer’s eye. Later on, improvements to the reflectivity of the mirrors used in the telescope made their clarity more refined and their power greatly increased. Today scientist have constructed telescopes as big as 10 meters across, that have up to 1,562,500 times the light-gathering potential than the human eye! In addition, scientists have spent nearly 2 billion dollars in order to create the Hubble telescope and to put it into orbit around the earth.
Something that we haven’t studies in class that the documentary covered was the measurements of the expanding universe that were made possible by the telescope. By measuring the Doppler effect of distant galaxies, scientists have deduced that universe is, in fact, expanding (opposed from the previous theory that the gravity of the matter of the universe would accumulate and creating a shrinking of the universe). This discovery also led to the concept of dark matter in the universe. I found this all very interesting and I am looking forward to learning about it in class. The portion about the future of the telescope really inspired

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