Jeffrey R. Regester Greensboro Day School Greensboro NC Telescopes Jeffrey R. Regester Greensboro Day School Greensboro NC

How a Telescope Works An optic (lens or mirror) focuses light to form an image. DEMO: image formation with lens & mirror That image is recorded on film, CCD chip, or magnified with an eyepiece for direct viewing with the eye.

Types of Telescopes Refractor Newtonian Reflector Cassegrain Reflector different solutions to the “head-in-the-way” problem with reflectors

Functions of a Telescope Magnification (least important) Collect lots of light Improved Angular Resolution

Angular Magnification Angular magnification definition: how many times larger the image looks, compared to the object seen without the telescope. In symbolic form... For a telescope with an eyepiece, the angular magnification is

Functions of a Telescope Magnification Collect lots of light Improved Angular Resolution

Light Collecting Area Most telescopes have a round aperture, so...

Example How much more light does one of the Keck 10m telescopes collect than your eye (pupil diameter 5mm)?

The Keck Telescopes Mauna Kea, Hawaii

A Simpler Way To Do That...

Continued... So the Keck telescope collects roughly 4,000,000 times more light than your eye. All other things being equal, it can see objects 4,000,000 times fainter than your eye. But, all other things are NOT equal... CCD detector are about 90% efficient; your eye is about 5% efficient. That is, CCDs are about 18 times more sensitive than your eye. Your eye cannot store or record the light. In other words, your eye can’t do a time exposure. The human eye is like a video camera that can’t record, taking “exposures” about 1/10th of a second long. (That’s why you don’t notice the flickering of a movie screen, which shows 24 frames per second.) So, if a CCD camera takes a 1-hour time exposure (3600 seconds), that’s about 36,000 times more than one “frame” of human vision. So really, the Keck can see things that are 4,000,000 times 18 times 36,000 times fainter than the human eye. That’s about 3 trillion times fainter!

Functions of a Telescope Magnification Collect lots of light Improved Angular Resolution

Angular Resolution The smallest angle that can be seen by the telescope, i.e. how much detail. We can’t see the surfaces of stars — they are too far away for that. The size of the dot of light formed by a telescope (and recorded by film or CCD chip) is determined by diffraction “seeing”

Diffraction The spreading of light when it goes through a hole or past a barrier. DEMOS light through a slit light through a round hole light past a thread

Diffraction Resolution is fundamentally limited by diffraction of the light waves entering the telescope. where D=diameter of the telescope λ= wavelength of the light Smaller θmin = better!

“Seeing” Caused by refraction of light passing through the turbulent column of air to the telescope. This limits resolution to no better than about 1arcsec, the diffraction limit of a 4-inch telescope.

The Solution to “Seeing” Simple solution: put the telescope in space. Another solution: Adaptive optics (This is only conceptually simple. Very complex to actually do, and expensive.)

Adaptive Optics AO system animation T Tauri system, without and with AO AO in operation

Numerical Resolution Example What would be the resolution of the Keck 10m telescope, using visible light, if it could be placed in space, or with a working AO system?