A telescope is an important tool for astronomy that gathers light and directs it to a single point. Some do this with curved mirrors, some with curved lenses, and some with both. Telescopes make faraway things look bigger, brighter and closer. Galileo was the first person to use a telescope for astronomy, but he did not invent them. The first telescope was invented in the Netherlands in 1608. Some telescopes, not mainly used for astronomy, are binoculars, camera lenses, or spyglasses.
The word "telescope" is usually used for light your eyes can see, but there are telescopes for "invisible" light. Infrared telescopes look like normal telescopes, but have to be kept cold since all warm things give off infrared light. Radio telescopes are like radio antennas, usually shaped like large dishes.
X-ray and Gamma ray telescopes have a problem because the rays go through most metals and glasses. To solve this problem, the mirrors are shaped like a bunch of rings inside each other so the rays strike them at a shallow angle and are reflected. These telescopes are space telescopes because not enough of this radiation reaches the Earth. Other space telescopes are put in orbit so the Earth's atmosphere does not interfere.
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Images for kids
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The 100 inch (2.54 m) Hooker reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, USA.
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The "onion" dome at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich housing a 28-inch refracting telescope with a remaining segment of William Herschel's 120-centimetre (47 in) diameter reflecting telescope (called the "40-foot telescope" due to its focal length) in the foreground.
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The primary mirror assembly of James Webb Space Telescope under construction. This is a segmented mirror and its coated with Gold to reflect (orange-red) visible light, through near-infrared to the mid-infrared
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Modern telescopes typically use CCDs instead of film for recording images. This is the sensor array in the Kepler spacecraft.
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50 cm refracting telescope at Nice Observatory.
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The Very Large Array at Socorro, New Mexico, United States.
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Einstein Observatory was a space-based focusing optical X-ray telescope from 1978.
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A 6′ wide view of the Crab nebula supernova remnant, viewed at different wavelengths of light by various telescopes
