Telescope Practice Quiz

1. __________________ is the bending of light when it passes from one transparent substance into another

refraction

2. A camera focuses light like an eye and captures the image with a ________detector.

CCD

3. What type of lens is shown here?

Convex

4. In a healthy eye, light is focused on the __________________.

retina

5. What are the two most important properties of a telescope?

Light collecting area and angular resolution

6. A _________________telescope uses a glass lens to focus light.

refracting

7. A telescope with good ________________ is able to detect objects that are spaced closely together in the sky (small angular distance).

Angular resolution

8. The angular resolution of a mirror depends directly on the ________ of the main mirror.

Diameter/size

9. True or false: It’s easier to build a large reflecting telescope than a large refracting telescope.

This is true. Large lenses are hard to make and hard to support.

10. True or false: A concave lens causes light rays to come together at the focus.

This is false, only convex lenses cause light rays to come together.

What kind of telescope is shown below?

Refracting telescope

Suppose the angular separation of two stars is smaller than the angular resolution of your eyes. How will the stars appear to your eyes?

The stars will appear to be a single point of light.

These lenses are thinner in the center and they refract parallel rays of light so that they diverge.

Concave

The limit on angular resolution, caused by the wave behavior of light, is known as the ______________.

Diffraction limit

15. How much more light can a telescope with a 10 meter diameter telescope collect than a 5 meter diameter telescope?

10 2 5 2 = 100 25 =4

16. If I wanted to study whether a particular star's brightness is steady or variable what kind of study would I do?

timing