Telescopes | The Schools' Observatory

Space-based Telescopes

The best thing about putting telescopes in space is that there is no atmosphere to look through!

This means that they can look at all wavelengths of light, including ones that never reach the surface of the Earth because the atmosphere blocks them out!

Artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope. There is a gold mirror on top made of connected small, hexagon shapes. This sits on a triangular base that appears to have a pink hue underneath it. A small solar panel is visible towards the back. The background is a black-grey night sky with countless small, white dots of stars, varying in size. Most of the stars are located towards the middle, forming a brighter, thick band that runs from almost the top-left corner to the middle-right of the image. — Artist's conception of the James Webb Space Telescope

Ground-based Telescopes

Most telescopes used by astronomers are on Earth. We call these ground-based telescopes.

Building a telescope on Earth is much easier and cheaper than in space. It is also much easier to fix if things go wrong.

A mountain top with a number of white domes that house telescopes. There are also a few small buildings. In the background, the sky is light blue towards the top, and there are some white clouds lower down, especially below the mountaintop. — Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in Garafía, La Palma

Las Cumbres Observatory

The Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) network was founded in 2005.

It has over 20 telescopes around the world. Each one is fully robotic, so people do not need to be on site. They are controlled over the internet.

White telescope domes of various sizes on a mountaintop. The ground is green and orange, and in the background, there are some trees. — LCO telescopes of various sizes at Siding Spring, Australia

Liverpool Telescope

The Liverpool Telescope (LT) is a robotic telescope with a 2-metre-diameter mirror. Astronomers and young people all over the world use it to study the Universe.

Telescopes Glossary

Instruments

When people first used telescopes, they looked through them and made drawings or notes of what they saw. Then cameras were invented, and we could save this information as a picture instead.

A 2.6-metre telescope, pointing upwards, inside its enclosure. — The VLT Survey Telescope inside of its enclosure

Filters

Ray Diagrams

Optics

Optics is an area of physics which looks at how light behaves and how we can observe it.

This usually involves using mirrors and lenses to magnify, focus, and direct the path of light.

There is an illustration of a bulging lens on the left. A dashed line runs through the centre across the image. Two red parallel lines hit the lens towards the top and bottom and then become diagonal, crossing paths at a point labelled "F" some distance after the lens. This distance is noted with a black arrow labelled "f'". — Light (red lines) passing through a convex lens. The point at which the light meets (F') is called the focus. The distance from the lens to the focus (f') is called the focal length.

Observatories

An astronomical observatory is a place or building used to look at events in space. They can contain just one telescope, but some have more than twenty.

A small, circular building on top of a mountain. The dome is open at the top, as if peeled back slightly, revealing a telescope that is pointed upwards. — The Liverpool Telescope within its enclosure

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