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A drawing of the telescope from an astronomy book. The fabrication of the two-element achromatic objective lens, the largest lens ever made at the time, caused years of delay. [2] The famous large telescope maker Alvan Clark, was in charge of the optical design. He gave the contract for casting the high quality optical glass blanks, of a size ...
1672 — Laurent Cassegrain, produces a design for a reflecting telescope using a paraboloid primary mirror and a hyperboloid secondary mirror. The design, named 'Cassegrain', is still used in astronomical telescopes used in observatories in 2006. 1674 — Robert Hooke produces a reflecting telescope based on the Gregorian design.
1983 – Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) telescope; 1984 – IRAM 30-m telescope at Pico Veleta near Granada, Spain completed; 1987 – 15-m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope UK submillimetre telescope installed at Mauna Kea Observatory; 1987 – 5-m Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) installed at the ESO La Silla Observatory
An astronomical instrument is a device for observing, measuring or recording astronomical data. They are used in the scientific field of astronomy , a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos, with the object of explaining their origin and evolution over time.
Notes on Hans Lippershey's unsuccessful telescope patent in 1608. The first record of a telescope comes from the Netherlands in 1608. It is in a patent filed by Middelburg spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey with the States General of the Netherlands on 2 October 1608 for his instrument "for seeing things far away as if they were nearby." [12] A few weeks later another Dutch instrument-maker ...
The idea that the objective, or light-gathering element, could be a mirror instead of a lens was being investigated soon after the invention of the refracting telescope. [8] The potential advantages of using parabolic mirrors —reduction of spherical aberration and no chromatic aberration —led to many proposed designs and several attempts to ...
The telescope is named after James E. Webb, who was the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968 during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Webb's primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold -plated beryllium , which together create a 6.5-meter-diameter (21 ft) mirror, compared with Hubble's 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in).
Historically, optical astronomy, which has been also called visible light astronomy, is the oldest form of astronomy. [59] Images of observations were originally drawn by hand. In the late 19th century and most of the 20th century, images were made using photographic equipment.