Telescope

Michelle J Cruz Abril

We born with the knowledge that we live in a universe with planets, stars, bright galaxies, nebula and other fantastic things. We have to be grateful of all those scientist and philosophers that pass all his life making experiments and observations. Thanks to them we have all the information about our universe. But a big part of this knowledge it because the invention of the telescope. One thing that capture my attention about telescopes is because we have in Arecibo, Puerto Rico the world largest radio single aperture radio telescope and this make me feel more proud because it doesn’t care that we are a tiny island we have a lot of interesting things.

We can’t guarantee who invented the investigations says that Hans Lippershey was the inventor of this great artifact he fabricate lens and wasn’t well educated but with test he discover that with two lens, one of lens it was near the eye and this lens have to be divergent and other far of the eye and this one was convegent. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), a mathematics professor in Italia, heard about this invention and constructs a telescope in less than a day. This was the beginning of the evolution of the telescope.

Galileo was fascinated about this new instrument and he comprehends more the functioning of the telescope because of that he can construct one that have an amplification of 30X but his range of visibility it was restrict. He discovers the craters of the moon, the four moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. One year later he decide to publish a book named “the messenger of the stars” and it have only 24 pages but in it related all his observations in a clear and direct language with this book the reputation of Galileo goes up. He support the theory of Nicholas Copernicus but he have to denied because he go to a judgment and they said if you don’t deny it we put you in jail for the rest of your life. He live his last days teaching and searching new methods of shape lens.

Now we have different kinds of telescopes: optical, gathers and focus light of different parts and this kind have different branch; refractors, use lens; reflectors, have a concave mirror instead an objective lens and catadioptric which use a corrector lens and a concave mirror. Other is the radio telescope this function with directional radio antennas. The third kind is the X-ray and gamma ray they are used in high energy astronomy and the last one is the gravitational wave. 

Is amazing all things that the human has discovered but I would like to imagine what come next. The nature of the human being is explorer and we like to know all, investigate the unknown and look for new things. What would be the next great discover it could be you or somebody near to you we doesn’t know the future but I want to see it!