How Do Telescopes and Microscopes Magnify?
Microscopes and telescopes have distinctly different functions, yet they both work on similar principals -- light and lenses.
With the invention of the telescope, mankind has been able to see deep into space with continuous new insights into how the universe works. The microscope has provided humanity with the ability to discover the function of minute aspects of cells and DNA strands.
The main component for both instruments is the lens. This simple idea is a curved piece of material that you can see through. The lens is either concave or convex. This discovery is still influencing science.
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Lenses
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The lens has a long history, even referred to by Roman philosophers Pliny the Elder and Seneca in the first century AD. They were called both magnifying glasses and burning glasses because the lens was used to concentrate sun ray's to start fires.
The clear object is curved on either one side or both in a concave or convex fashion. Concave is thicker at the edges and thinner in the middle, which makes an object look smaller. Convex is the opposite; thinner on the outer edges and thicker in the middle, which makes an object look bigger by focusing the light in one place.
The light coming through the lens is refracted or bent as is passes through the lens.
Telescope History
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Although Galileo is commonly credited with inventing the telescope, it was actually Hans Lippershey, a Dutchman in approximately 1608 who discovered that by using two lenses separated from each other that an object was seemingly closer.
Galileo took this idea and developed his own version. Galileo then became renowned for his use of the this device. He looked to the stars with his creation and discovered amazing objects like the rings around the planet Saturn. His most important scientific discovery from the use of his new looking device was to confirm a theory of Nicholas Copernicus that the stars and heavenly bodies did not rotate around the earth, but around the sun.
Another inventor, Johannes Kepler modified Galileo's device by changing the concave lens used by Galileo to a convex lens with an additional prism. This allowed for a wider viewing angle.
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Microscope History
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The simple lens or burning glasses mentioned by the Romans had a slight magnification. People used these lenses to better view tiny insects, especially the common flea and the magnifying lenses became known as flea glasses.
In 1590, Zaccharias and Janssen, spectacle lens makers put lenses inside a tube. They discovered that objects at the end of the tube were enlarged greatly. To add to this important discovery, Anthony Leeuwenhoek began experimenting with lens size and curvature. The rounder the lens, the more magnification. He eventually reached a magnification of 270 times normal.
His work led him to look at objects that had so far been too small for the human eye. He looked at blood cells, bacteria, yeast and tiny animals and plants in water.
Lens Function
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The telescope is a fairly simple device---one or more lenses positioned within a tube that collects light via a convex lens (objective lens or mirror). The light redirects or refracts the light to the focal point, usually by a prism (second multi-faceted lens), which creates the impression that the object is close.
The microscope also has a simple lens alignment to produce the magnified effect. The objective, a convex lens located at the bottom of the microscope magnifies and refracts the object's image up the microscope tube to the top convex lens and further magnifies it. A compound microscope uses two lenses. One lens creates and enlarges the image, and the second lens further magnifies the first image.
The Future
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The creations of both the microscope and telescope have opened up the scientific world. Telescopes are now enormous and are looking deep into space. For microscopes, the discovery has opened up the micro world of atoms, atomic and sub-atomic theories.
These two powerful tools of the scientific community no doubt will provide many more discoveries whether at the end of the universe or the sub-atomic level.
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