Timeline of Telescopes

Timeline of the Telescope

1937 - Radio Telescope

1897- The Yerkes Telescope

2005 - Large Binocular Telescope

PRESENT - Thirty Meter Telescope

The First Telescope

1789 - The First of Many Giants

1663- The Gregorian Refracting Telescope

The world was shaken by Karl Jansky's 1932 report of Radio Waves coming from the sky, but the astrological community payed little attention until an amateur astronomer, Grote Reber built his parabola-shaped dish telescope in 1937.

X-Rays pass through the earths atmosphere without distortion or absorbtion, undistorted like light can be.

1686 - Christaain Huygens and his open-air telescope

1721- John Hadley and Parabolic Mirrors

The largest achromatic refractor telescope to date; this telescope was financed buy a dishonest Chicago Tycoon who liked the idea of his name going down in history and repeatedly insisted it had to be the largest in the world.

It is built in a typically low area, but in a region near Chicago that has typically clear skies.

The telescope is 18 meters long and balanced so well it could be hand-adjusted, though it was controlled by electric motors.

This telescope was renovated in 1969 and still used today.

The telescope was very small in comparison to the radio waves it was trying to pick up, and as a result Reber ended up with very poor resolution, but Reber managed to produce a complete radio map of our galaxy.

Sir William Herschel created a 40 foot long telescope which was 4 feet in diameter. This telescope used large mirrors that captured 1000 times more light than refractors.

It was the first of the giant reflector telescopes.

Herschel removed the small diagonal mirror of a standard reflector design and instead tilted his primary mirror so he could view the formed image directly. This has been dubbed the "Heschelian Telescope"

The LBT achived "First Light" on October 12, 2005. The LBT can see further into space and with better clarity than the Hubble Telescope.

It is located on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona.

The LBT uses two giant side-by-side mirrors, each with a diameter of 8.4 meters.

The benefit of the two mirrors is a combination of the light paths of the two primary meters results in a resolution of a 22.8 meter telescope.

Artist's Rendering

Patented by Hans Lipperhey on the 25th of September 1608;

the First Telescope combined several curved lenses to magnify objects up to three times.

Lipperhey was a German spectacle maker and would go on to craft sets of binocular telescopes for the government of the Netherands.

With the length of telescopes increasing to over 100 ft in an effort to reduce spherical aberration, Huygens decided that the tubes were the problem.

With his primary lens in a short iron tube and attached it to a high pole, and the eyepiece in another small tube on the ground, Huygens ran a length of cord between the two to help line them up, resulting in a telescope over 120 feet long, all in open air.

He would have difficulties lining up the lenses and the aberration would still be present.

All previous telescopes had had spherical parts; whether they were mirrors or lenses. These round parts resulted in the spherical aberration in viewed images.

For a clearer images, a parabolic mirror was required; and people had known this since the Gregorian designs, they just didn't have the technology until John Hadley built a Gregorian reflector which had very little spherical aberration.

Currently under construction, the TMT will eventually become the most advanced and powerful optical telescope on Earth. Projected completion by the end of this decade, this telescope will allow us to study nearby celestial bodies; solar systems and stars, within our own galaxy and its nearby galaxies, as well as the forming galaxies at the very edge of the observable universe, near the beginning of time.

Years before the necessary technology, James Gregory designed the telescope with a parabolic primary mirror.

His envisioned telescope’s images would have been free of both chromatic and spherical aberration. By using a mirror, rather than a lens, Gregory eliminated chromatic aberration. The mirror's shape was parabolic, not spherical, eliminating spherical aberration.

The outbreak of WW2 put a damper on Reber's progress, but advanced the development of Radio Telescopes, the allie's secret weapon: Radio Detection and Ranging: RADAR.

Image taken by LBT Oct. 12 2005

In 1659 Huygens was the one to identify the rings around Saturn.

Biblography

2000

1900

1800

1600

Dunbar, Brian. "Telescope History." NASA. NASA, 23 Dec. 2003. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/9-12/features/telescope_feature_912.html

Taylor Redd, Nola. "William Herschel Biography." Space.com. Tech Media Network, 4 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2014. http://www.space.com/17432-william-herschel.html

"Time Line: A History of Telescopes." Telescopes Timeline — National Geographic Magazine. National Geographic, 2014 Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/telescopes/telescopes-interactive

"Telescopes from the Ground Up." Telescopes from the Ground Up. Amazing Space, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/?return=true

"Telescope Timeline - Astronomy For Kids - KidsAstronomy.com." Telescope Timeline - Astronomy For Kids - KidsAstronomy.com. KidsKnowIt.com, 2014 Web. 20Mar. 2014. http://www.kidsastronomy.com/telescopesD.htm

Van Helden, Albert . "The Galileo Project | Science | Christoph Scheiner." The Galileo Project | Science | Christoph Scheiner. N.p., 1995Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/scheiner.html

The Large Zenith Telescope

A liquid mirror telescope is a telescope where the mirror is made of reflective metal in liquid form, and the liquid is rotated quickly enough it assumes a parabolic shape.

This shape is exactly the shaped required for the large mirror that bases most reflecting telescopes.

A difficulty with these telescopes is that they must remain pointing straight up so as not to disturb the liquid and therefore do not have any range of motion.

The Large Zenith Telescope in British Colombia was a collaborative project between UBC, Laval University and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, as well as engineers and astronomers from other universities.

This mirror is made of liquid mercury, a popular substance for these telescopes.

The telescope was completed in 2003, and is currently the largest liquid mirror telescope in the world, with a diameter of 6 meters.

The LZT is currently used for long-term sky surveys in which light from over 100,000 distant galaxies is collected and studied and for supernova searches, whereby astronomers are trying to see the explosive energy of a star in its death.

1700

1971 - The Hooker Telescope

1990 - The HUBBLE Space Telescope

1991 - Compton Gamma Ray Observatory

Looking Up

1688- The Telescope of Sir Isaac Newton

1840 - The first Astrophotograph

1845- The Leviathan of Parsonstown

The Kepler Telescope

1729 - Chester Moor Hall and his Achromatic Lense

Lord Rose of Ireland decided he wanted to build the world's largest telescope.

Chester Moor Hall developed an achromatic lens with the goal to get rid of Chromatic Aberration. His lens involves two pieces of glass with different refractions. His telescope produced the sharpest image thus far in all telescope history up to that point.

This resulted in a refracting telescope with no chromatic aberration.

Galileo was one of the first to use Lippershey's invention upon the night sky. He would go on to improve upon the design; working for a higher magnification.

HIs first versions improved the

telescope to view the eight power;

and by January 7 1610 he had

achieved a magnification of 30.

He would be the first to see the moons of Jupiter.

Named in honor of Edwin Hubble, The HST orbits around the earth, and gives astronomers clear images in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light without any interference from the Earth's atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the HST had many setbacks. With the tragedy of Challenger, space flights came to an abrupt halt.

Finally in space, it was revealed that there was a flaw in one of the mirrors. The photos sent back to earth were blurry.

The HST had been designed to be able to be repaired, and three years later the imaging was crystal clear.

Since then, the Hubble has sent back countless images and has been periodically visited by astronauts for regular maintenance.

There was only one glassmaker willing to attempt the making of the 100-inch glass disk; and when it arrived in 1908, astronomers thought it was worthless. It was full of air bubbles and the structural integrity was corrupt. With the lack of resources due to WW1, they had no choice but to the defected glass. It took 5 years to transform the glass into the mirror.

The telescope, the dome and the shutters were all controlled by 30 electric motors.

The drawbacks, howevere, were the mirror would expand and contract with changing temperatures, causing the telescope to loose focus.

Edwin Hubble used this telescope to identify spiral nebulae

Sir Isaac Newton was the first to successfully build a reflecting telescope. His telescope would solve one of the two huge problems with telescopes at the time.

With his telescope, the light was not filtered through a lense, and therefore there was no Chromatic Aberration, the colour was not distorted and did not bleed.

Unfortunately, he was not able to correct spherical aberration, or the shape distortion of the images cause by the round mirrors.

The CGRO, named after astronomer Arthur Holly Compton, spent 9 years orbiting earth. Unlike the rest of NASA's telescopes - or any telescope, for that matter - the CGRO didn't have a mirror. Instead of collecting light it tracked gamma radiation. It observed gamma radiation indirectly by monitering specific flashes of visible light that occurred when specific portions of the gamma ray spectrum hit the liquid crystal detectors built into the four instruments.

In 1611 Johannes Kepler made many modifications to the telescope designs of Galilleo. His telescope used a convex lens as the eyepiece instead of Galileo's concave one.

This allowed for a much wider field of view and greater eye relief, but the image for the viewer is inverted. Much greater magnifications can be reached with this design, but to correct the high spherical aberration the simple objective lens needs to have a very high f-ratio (Must be much larger) The design also allowed for a micrometer at the focal plane (determining the size and/or distance between objects observed).

Spherical aberration was never completely eliminated.

The huge telescope, dubbed "the Leviathan of

Parsonstown" was hung by chains from two 50-foot

stone walls. Rosse, sitting on a platform 50 feet in the

air, would gaze down the tube.

However, the telescope had two main problems.

The first; the Leviathan could only be moved up and

down, not side to side, giving it a terribly small view.

The second; the area in which the telescope was built

had bad weather and much atmospheric distortion

making viewing difficult. For the first time, WHERE

the telescope was had become an important factor.

John William Draper made the very first detailed photograph of the full moon

First, Draper made moon’s rays pass through a lens four inches in diameter and fifteen feet in focus. His exposure time of 30 minutes, however, proved too long, resulting in a partially blackened, overexposed plate.

On his second try Draper succeeded in capturing another image of the moon by using two lenses and exposing the plate for 45 minutes, resulting in a more distinct, detailed photograph of the moon’s surface.

The telescope was retired after one of the gyroscopes failed, and NASA decided that if they were to lose the second gyroscope it would be too hard to control. The CGRO outlived it's expected 5 years, and had already helped determine large blasts of gamma ray energy were coming from outside our galaxy.

Illustration of a 46 m (150 ft) focal length Keplerian astronomical refracting telescope built by Johannes Hevelius. (1670)