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Making a simple convex lens from rock crystal has been known from before recorded history, and various descriptions exist of early isolated attempts to make usable telescopes. The effects of pinhole and concave lenses were writen about in the Book of Optics by Arabian astronomer and mathematician, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), around 1020 CE. The idea of an "observation tube" without lenses also dates back to the works of Albatenius and al-Biruni.Regis Morelon, "General Survey of Arabic Astronomy", pp. 9-10, in (Rashed & Morelon 1996, pp. 1-19)
The telescope reached a state of development that led to rapid and spectacular advances in astronomy only when Dutch-made telescopes, following Lippershey\'s design of a convex main lens and a concave eyepiece lens, became widely available in Europe in 1608. Galileo greatly improved upon this same design the following year. In 1611, Kepler scientifically explained how a telescope could be made with two convex lenses. A telescope made using his design was first built in 1630, and by 1655 Huygens was building powerful and unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces, to study the planets.
The reflecting telescope was invented earlier, in the 16th century, by English surveyor Leonard Digges. But it did not become widespread at the time. Digges also probably put together two lenses to make a refracting telescope, but if so it was not commonly used. In 1616, Nicholò Zucchi constructed a reflecting telescope with which he discovered the bands of Jupiter in 1630, but it was relatively impractical.
Newton designed a reflector in about 1668 with a small flat diagonal mirror to reflect the light 90 degrees to an eyepiece mounted on the side of the telescope tube. He presented a working example to the Royal Society in 1672, with a spherical mirror of 1 1/2 inch diameter and 6 inch focal length, made of low reflectivity (about 16%) bronze speculum metal. Laurent Cassegrain in the same year described the design of a reflector with a small convex hyperboloidal secondary mirror placed near the prime focus, to reflect light through a central hole in the main mirror.
But it wasn\'t until 49 years later in 1721, when mathematician John Hadley showed how, in practice rather than in theory, to produce much larger paraboloidal mirrors (initially about 6 inches in diameter), that Newtonian reflectors began to proliferate. And it was much later that anyone made telescopes to Cassegrain\'s design. Cassegrain\'s and Newton\'s are still among the most commonly used types of reflecting telescopes today.
The doublet achromatic lens, the kind still used in most modern refracting telescopes, first appeared in a 1733 telescope made by Chester Moore Hall, who did not publicize it. John Dollond independently developed achromatic lenses, and produced telescopes using them in commercial quantities starting in 1758.
The first radio telescope went into operation in 1937. Since then a tremendous variety of complex astronomical instruments have been developed.
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The earliest lenses were not made from glass, but carved and ground from rock crystal (quartz). It is generally difficult to determine whether artifacts found by archaeologists are jewellery or deliberate attempts at producing lenses. An overview can be found in G. Sines & Y. Sakellarakis: "Lenses in Antiquity", American Journal of Archaeology 91 (1987), 191-196.
The recorded use of lenses appears in Greek and Roman sources (see Lens (optics)).
The beginnings of telescopic astronomy can be traced back to the Iraqi astronomer Ibn al-Haytham (known as Alhazen in the West), the "father of optics", in the 11th century. His work was influential in the development of the modern telescope.O. S. Marshall (1950). "Alhazen and the Telescope", Astronomical Society of the Pacific Leaflets 6, p. 4. The effects of pinhole and concave lenses were writen about in his Book of Optics circa 1020 CE.(Wade & Finger 2001)(Elliott & 1966 Chapter 1)
Archaeologists have discovered precisely lathe-turned and polished quartz lenses at Visby on the island of Gotland in Sweden. The Visby lenses can be dated to the second half of the 11th century. These lenses have one strongly curved surface that is nearly a perfect ellipsoid, and the other side is convex but flatter. Most of the ten finished lenses are unmounted, but some have a silver mounting and might have been worn around the neck as pendants. The strong convexity of these examples seems to suit them more for use as loupes than as telescope objectives, but their aspheric shape gives surprisingly good images for lenses of such high curvature. [1][2]
From approximately the 11th century in Europe, \'reading stones\' - magnifying lenses placed on the reading material - are well documented, as well as the use of lenses as burning glasses. Robert Grosseteste wrote several scientific treatises between 1230 and 1235 including De Iride (Concerning the Rainbow) in which he said:
This part of optics, when well understood, shows us how we may make things a very long distance off appear as if placed very close, and large near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a distance appear any size we want, so that it may be possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distances...
Roger Bacon was a pupil of Grosseteste at Oxford, and is frequently stated as having described a telescope in the 13th century, however it is not certain if he built a working model.
It is generally considered that in Europe spectacles for correcting long sightedness with convex lenses were invented in Northern Italy in the late 13th to early 14th century. It is possible they had been invented and were in use in China before this period, but the knowledge had not spread, and the invention in Italy was independent. The invention of the use of concave lenses to correct near-sightedness is ascribed to Nicholas of Cusa in 1451.
Thus, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, the availability of lenses for spectacles means that it was possible for many individuals to discover the principles of a telescope using one concave and one convex lens, but there is little clear documentation and no physical evidence found of such a discovery.
There is strong documentary evidence, but no physical evidence, that both reflecting and refracting telescopes were known in England in the late 16th century. Writings by John Dee and Thomas Digges in 1570 and 1571 respectively ascribe the use of both reflecting and refracting telescopes to Thomas\' father, Leonard Digges. This is independently confirmed by a report by William Bourne in approximately 1580. However, this knowledge was not exploited, and it was not until the early 17th century in the Netherlands that the knowledge of construction and use of telescopes became widespread.
The practical exploitation of the instrument was certainly achieved in the Netherlands about 1608, but the credit of the original invention has been claimed on behalf of three individuals, Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, spectacle-makers in Middelburg, and Jacob Metius of Alkmaar, also known as Jacob Adriaanszoon.
The original Dutch telescopes were composed of a convex and a concave lens, and telescopes so constructed do not invert the image. Telescopes seem to have been made in the Netherlands in considerable numbers soon after the date of their invention, and rapidly found their way all over Europe.
Galileo happened to be in Venice in about the month of May 1609, and there heard of a perspective instrument by means of which distant objects appeared nearer and larger. Galileo states that he solved the problem of the construction of a telescope the first night after his return to Padua from Venice, and made his first telescope the next day by fitting a convex lens in one extremity of a leaden tube and a concave lens in the other one. A few days afterwards, having succeeded in making a better telescope than the first, he took it to Venice, where he communicated the details of his invention to the public, and presented the instrument itself to the doge Leonardo Donato, sitting in full council. The senate, in return, settled him for life in his lectureship at Padua and doubled his salary. Galileo may thus claim to have invented the telescope independently, but not until he had heard that others had done so.
Galileo devoted his time to improving and perfecting the telescope, and soon succeeded in producing telescopes of greatly increased power. His first telescope magnified three diameters; but he soon made instruments which magnified eight diameters, and finally one that magnified thirty-three diameters. With this last instrument he discovered in 1610 the satellites of Jupiter, and soon afterwards the spots on the sun, the phases of Venus, and the hills and valleys on the Moon. He demonstrated the revolution of the satellites of Jupiter around the planet, and gave rough predictions of their configurations, proved the rotation of the Sun on its axis, established the general truth of the Copernican system as compared with that of Ptolemy, and fairly routed the fanciful dogmas of the philosophers. These brilliant achievements, together with Galileo\'s immense improvement of the instrument, overshadowed to a great degree the credit due to the original inventor, and led to the universal adoption of the name of the Galilean telescope for the form of the instrument invented by Lippershey.
Johannes Kepler first explained the theory and some of the practical advantages of a telescope constructed of two convex lenses in his Catoptrics (1611). The first person who actually constructed a telescope of this form was the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner, who gives a description of it in his Rosa Ursina (1630).
William Gascoigne was the first who practically appreciated a chief advantage of the form of telescope suggested by Kepler, viz., the visibility of the image of a distant object simultaneously with that of a small material object placed in the common focus of the two lenses. This led to his invention of the micrometer and his application of telescopic sights to precision astronomical instruments. But it was not till about the middle of the 17th century that Kepler\'s telescope came into general use, and then, not so much because of the advantages pointed out by Gascoigne, but because its field of view was much larger than in the Galilean telescope.
The first powerful telescopes of Keplerian construction were made by Christiaan Huygens, after much labour, in which he was assisted by his brother. With one of these, of 12 ft. focal length, he discovered the brightest of Saturn\'s satellites (Titan) in 1655, and in 1659 he published his Systema Saturnium, in which was given for the first time a true explanation of Saturn\'s ring, founded on observations made with the same instrument.
The sharpness of the image in Kepler\'s telescope was very inferior to that of the Galilean instrument. When high magnifying powers were required, it became essential to increase the focal length, since longer focal lengths resulted in less trouble with chromatic aberration.
Giovanni Cassini discovered Saturn\'s fifth satellite (Rhea) In 1672 with a telescope of 35 ft., and the third and fourth satellites in 1684 with telescopes made by Campani of 100 and 136 ft. focal length. Christian Huygens states that he and his brother made object-glasses of 170 and 210 ft. focal length, and he presented one of 123 ft. to the Royal Society of London. Adrien Auzout (died in 1691) and others are said to have made telescopes of from 300 to 600 ft. focal length, but it does not appear that they were ever able to use them in practical observations. James Bradley, on December 27, 1722, actually measured the diameter of Venus with a telescope whose object glass had a focal length of 212 ft.
In these very long telescopes no tube was employed, and they were consequently termed aerial telescopes. Huygens contrived some ingenious arrangements for directing such telescopes towards any object visible in the heavens - the focal adjustment and centring of the eyepiece being preserved by a braced rod connecting the object glass and eyepiece. Other contrivances for the same purpose are described by Philippe de la Hire (Mém. de l\'Acad., 1715) and by Nicolaus Hartsoeker (Miscel. Berol., 1710, vol. i. p. 261). Telescopes of such great length were naturally difficult to use, and must have taxed to the utmost the skill and patience of the observers. One cannot but pay a passing tribute of admiration to the men who, with such troublesome tools, achieved such results.
Until Newton\'s discovery of the different refrangibility of light of different colours, it was generally supposed that object-glasses of telescopes were subject to no other errors than those which arose from the spherical figure of their surfaces, and the efforts of opticians were chiefly directed to the construction of lenses of other forms of curvature.
Leonard Digges, an English surveyor, is recorded by William Bourne as having constructed and used a reflecting telescope in the 16th century. Niccolò Zucchi, an Italian Jesuit astronomer and physicist is regarded as having produced a reflecting telescope in 1616 and using it in 1630 to discover the belts of Jupiter. Zucchi wrote a treatise between 1652 and 1656 entitled Optica philosophia experimentalis et ratione a fundamentis constituta which may have inspired the later work by James Gregory and Isaac Newton.
James Gregory, in his Optica Promota (1663), discusses the forms of images and objects produced by lenses and mirrors, and shows that when the surfaces of the lenses or mirrors are portions of spheres the images are curves concave towards the objective, but if the curves of the surfaces are conic sections, the spherical aberration is corrected. He was well aware of the failures of all attempts to perfect telescopes by employing lenses of various forms of curvature, and accordingly proposed the form of reflecting telescope which bears his name: the Gregorian telescope. But Gregory, according to his own confession, had no practical skill; he could find no optician capable of realizing his ideas, and after some fruitless attempts was obliged to abandon all hope of bringing his telescope into practical use. Newton was the first person for whom we have indisputable evidence that he constructed a reflecting telescope.
When in 1666 Newton made his discovery of the different refrangibility of light of different colours, he soon perceived that the faults of the refracting telescope were due much more to this cause than to the spherical figure of the lenses. He overhastily concluded from some rough experiments (Optics, bk. i. pt. ii. prop. 3) that all refracting substances diverged the prismatic colours in a constant proportion to their mean refraction; and he drew the natural conclusion that refraction could not be produced without colour, and therefore that no improvement could he expected from the refracting telescope (Treatise on Optics, p. 112). But, having ascertained by experiment that for all colours of light the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, he turned his attention to the construction of reflecting telescopes.
After much experiment he selected an alloy (speculum metal) of tin and copper as the most suitable material for his specula, and he devised means for grinding and polishing them. He did not attempt the formation of a parabolic figure on account of the probable mechanical difficulties, and he had besides satisfied himself that the chromatic and not the spherical aberration formed the chief faults of previous telescopes. Newton\'s first telescope so far realized his expectations that he could see with its aid the satellites of Jupiter and the horns of Venus. Encouraged by this success, he made a second telescope, with a magnifying power of 38 diameters, which he presented to the Royal Society of London in December 1672.
A third form of reflecting telescope was devised in 1672 by Cassegrain (Journal des Savants, 1672).
No further practical advance appears to have been made in the design or construction of the instrument till the year 1721, when John Hadley (best known as the inventor of the octant) presented to the Royal Society a reflecting telescope of the Newtonian construction, with a metallic speculum of 6 inch aperture and 62 3/4 inch focal length, having eyepieces magnifying up to 230 diameters. The instrument was examined by Pound and Bradley, the former of whom reported upon it in Phil. Trans., 1723, No. 378, p. 382. After remarking that Newton\'s telescope had lain neglected these fifty years, they stated that Hadley had sufficiently shown that this noble invention does not consist in bare theory. They compared its performance with that of the object-glass of 123 ft. focal length presented to the Royal Society by Huygens, and found that Hadley\'s reflector "will bear such a charge as to make it magnify the object as many times as the latter with its due charge," and that it represents objects as distinct, though not altogether so clear and bright.
Bradley and Samuel Molyneux, having been instructed by Hadley in his methods of polishing specula, succeeded in producing some telescopes of considerable power, one of which had a focal length of 8 ft.; and, Molyneux having communicated these methods to Scarlet and Hearn, two London opticians, the manufacture of telescopes as a matter of business was commenced by them (Smith\'s Opticks, bk, iii. ch. I Smith, Robert, Compleat system of opticks in four books, (Cambridge, 1738)).
But it was reserved for James Short of Edinburgh to give practical effect to Gregory\'s original idea. Born at Edinburgh in 1710 and originally educated for the church, Short attracted the attention of Maclaurin, professor of mathematics at the university, who permitted him about 1732 to make use of his rooms in the college buildings for experiments in the construction of telescopes. In Short\'s first telescopes the specula were of glass, as suggested by Gregory, but he afterwards used metallic specula only, and succeeded in giving to them true parabolic and elliptic figures. Short then adopted telescope-making as his profession, which he practised first in Edinburgh and afterwards in London. All Short\'s telescopes were of the Gregorian form, and some of them retain even to the present day their original high polish and sharp definition. Short died in London in 1768, having realized a considerable fortune by the exercise of his profession.
About the year 1774 William Herschel, then a teacher of music in Bath, began to occupy his leisure hours with the construction of specula, and finally devoted himself entirely to their construction and use. In 1778 he selected a 6 1/4 inch speculum, the best of some 400 specula which he had made, and with it built his celebrated 7 foot focal length telescope. Using this telescope, he made his early brilliant astronomical discoveries.
In 1783 Herschel completed a reflector of approximately 18 inches aperture and 20 ft. focal length. He observed the heavens with this telescope for some twenty years, replacing the speculum several times. In 1789 he built a giant reflector of 48 inches aperture and 40 ft. focal length, with which he made additional discoveries. This telescope suffered from problems of scale that were not altogether solved in Herschel\'s century, and thus it never was as satisfactory as the 20 foot telescope.
But the reflecting telescope became the only available tool of the astronomer when great light grasp was needed.
The first person who succeeded in making achromatic refracting telescopes was Chester Moore Hall, a gentleman of Essex.
He argued that the different humours of the human eye so refract rays of light as to produce an image on the retina which is free from colour, and he reasonably argued that it might be possible to produce a like result by combining lenses composed of different refracting media. After devoting some time to the inquiry he found that, by combining two lenses formed of different kinds of glass, he could make an "achromatic lens" where the effects of the unequal refrangibility of light was corrected. In 1733 he succeeded in constructing telescope lenses which exhibited much reduced chromatic aberration. One of these instruments of only 20 inches focal length had an aperture of 2 1/2 inches.
Dollond telescope
Hall was a man of independent means, and seems to have been careless of fame; at least he took no trouble to communicate his invention to the world. At a trial in Westminster Hall about the patent rights granted to John Dollond (Watkin v. Dollond), Hall was admitted to be the first inventor of the achromatic telescope; but it was ruled by Lord Mansfield that it was not the person who locked his invention in his scrutoire who ought to profit from such invention, but he who brought it forth for the benefit of mankind.
In 1747 Leonhard Euler communicated to the Berlin Academy of Sciences a memoir in which he endeavoured to prove the possibility of correcting both the chromatic and the spherical aberration of an object-glass. Like Gregory and Hall, he argued that, since the various humours of the human eye were so combined as to produce a perfect image, it should be possible by suitable combinations of lenses of different refracting media to construct a perfect object-glass. Adopting a hypothetical law of the dispersion of differently coloured rays of light, he proved analytically the possibility of constructing an achromatic object-glass composed of lenses of glass and water.
But all of Euler\'s efforts to produce an actual object-glass of this construction were fruitless - a failure which he attributed solely to the difficulty of procuring lenses worked precisely to the requisite curves (Mem. Acad. Berlin, 1753).
Dollond admitted the accuracy of Euler\'s analysis, but disputed his hypothesis on the grounds that it was purely a theoretical assumption, that the theory was opposed to the results of Newton\'s experiments on the refrangibility of light, and that it was impossible to determine a physical law from analytical reasoning alone (Phil. Trans., 1753, p. 289).
In 1754 Euler communicated to the Berlin Academy a further memoir, in which, starting from the hypothesis that light consists of vibrations excited in an elastic fluid by luminous bodies, and that the difference of colour of light is due to the greater or less frequency of these vibrations in a given time, he deduced his previous results. He did not doubt the accuracy of Newton\'s experiments quoted by Dollond.
Dollond did not reply to this, but soon afterwards he received an abstract of a memoir by Samuel Klingenstierna, the Swedish mathematician and astronomer, which led him to doubt the accuracy of the results deduced by Newton on the dispersion of refracted light. Klingenstierna showed from purely geometrical considerations, fully appreciated by Dollond, that the results of Newton\'s experiments could not be brought into harmony with other universally accepted facts of refraction.
A practical man, Dollond at once put his doubts to the test of experiment, confirmed the conclusions of Klingenstierna, discovered a difference far beyond his hopes in the refractive qualities of different kinds of glass with respect to their divergency of colours, and was thus rapidly led to the construction of object-glasses in which first the chromatic and afterwards the spherical aberration were corrected (Phil. Trans., 1758, p. 733).
Dollond was aware of the conditions necessary for the attainment of achromatism in refracting telescopes, but long placed implicit reliance on the accuracy of experiments made by so illustrious a philosopher as Newton. His writings show that but for this confidence he would have arrived sooner at a discovery for which his mind was fully prepared. Dollond\'s memoir (Phil. Trans., 1758, p. 733) recounts the successive steps by which he arrived at his discovery independently of Hall\'s earlier invention, and the logical processes by which these steps were successively suggested to his mind.
The triple object-glass, consisting of a combination of two convex lenses of crown glass with a concave flint lens between them, was introduced in 1765 by Peter Dollond, son of John Dollond, and he made many excellent telescopes of this kind.
The difficulty of procuring disks of glass (especially of flint glass) of suitable purity and homogeneity limited the diameter and light gathering power of achromatic telescope lenses. It was in vain that the French Academy of Sciences offered prizes for large perfect disks of optical flint glass. Not until 1866 did refracting telescopes reach 18 inches aperture.
Optical reflecting telescopes naturally focussed infrared and ultraviolet light, and these wavelengths were utilised for astronomy as soon as suitable photographic material became available. In the 1930s Grote Reber commenced a privately funded project to build a reflecting telescope which would operate at radio wavelengths. The optical design was similar to that of previous optical reflecting telescopes, but the detector and construction materials were different. The telescope was completed in 1937, and this prompted a new era of observational astronomy after World War II, with telescopes being developed for a wide range of wavelengths all the way from radio to X-ray.
In 1868 Fizeau noted that the purpose of the arrangement of mirrors or glass lenses in a conventional telescope was simply to provide an approximation to a Fourier transform of the optical wave field entering the telescope. As this mathematical transform was well understood and could be performed mathematically on paper, he noted that using an array of small instruments it would be possible to measure the diameter of a star with the same precision as a single telescope which was as large as the whole array, a technique which later became known as astronomical interferometry. It was not until 1891 that Michelson successfully used this technique for the measurement of astronomical angular diameters, those of Jupiter\'s satellites (Michelson 1891). Finally, 30 years later, a direct interferometric measurement of a stellar diameter was realized by Michelson & Pease (1921) with their 20 ft (6.1 m) interferometer mounted on the 100 inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson.
The next major development came in 1946 when Ryle and Vonberg (Ryle and Vonberg 1946) constructed a radio analogue of the Michelson interferometer and soon located a number of new cosmic radio sources. The signals from two radio antennas were added electronically to produce interference. Ryle and Vonberg\'s telescope used the rotation of the Earth to scan the sky in one dimension. With the development of larger arrays, and of computers which could rapidly perform the necessary Fourier transforms, the first aperture synthesis imaging instruments were soon developed, which could obtain high resolution images without the need of a giant parabolic reflector to perform the Fourier transform. This technique is now used in most radio astronomy observations. Radio astronomers soon developed the mathematical methods to perform aperture synthesis Fourier imaging using much larger arrays of telescopes, often spread across more than one continent. In the 1980s the aperture synthesis technique was extended to visible light and infrared astronomy providing the first very high resolution optical and infrared images of nearby stars.
In 1995 this imaging technique was demonstrated on an array of separate optical telescopes for the first time, allowing a further improvement in resolution, and allowing even higher resolution imaging of stellar surfaces. The same techniques have now been applied at a number of other astronomical telescope arrays, including the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer, the CHARA array and the IOTA array. A detailed description of the development of astronomical optical interferometry can be found here.
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