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A good Telescope will open up a whole new world
of discovery for your child (and need not cost
the earth!)
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Astronomy is a fascinating hobby and opens
up a whole new world of discovery for the more inquisitive
child (and also great for parents who want to recapture
some of their childhood excitement!). Knowledge gained during
childhood through astronomy - about the moon, planets, solar
systm and star constellations tends to remain with people
throughout their lives. The most important tool of the astronomer
is the Telescope (although sometimes a good pair
binoculars may be used).There are two main categories of
telescope: RefRACtors and RefLECtors. Refractors,
use two or more lenses to collect and focus the light from
an object to the eye of the observer (or a digital camera
sensor), and can trace their design back to the telescopes
of Galileo’s era. Reflectors, developed by Isaac
Newton in the 17th century, use mirrors to focus the light.
As magnifications increase, impurities in the glass of lenses
can cause distortion (commonly a “rainbow-like” halo around
objects) requiring expensive and difficult treatments and
coatings to correct. Reflectors telescopes avoid this problem,
and are generally cheaper to manufacture for a given sized
aperture (the main lens or mirror used to catch the incoming
light). As a result, most high-performance optical telescopes,
including the Hubble Space Telescope, are reflector designs.
See Also: more
Learning Toys , high-performance
Telescopes |
Choosing a Telescope: The most important thing to
look for in a telescope is the quality of the lenses and
mirrors. Generally speaking, the larger the diameter of
the LIGHT COLLECTOR (on a refractor telescope, this is the
diameter of the objective lens, on a reflector telescope,
this is the diameter of the main mirror), the more light
can be collected, and hence the greater the quality of the
magnified image. Usually, the more you pay, the higher the
quality of the magnified image. This is not always the case
though among the telescopes we regularly review. We have
chosen our range of children's telescopes in such a way
that they represent a very good trade-off between quality
and price. These telescopes are powerful enough to enable
amateur astronomists - especially children and curious adults
- to discover a wealth of hidden secrets in the night sky,
without their parents having to pay the earth!
Origins of Telescopes: Lenses were invented independently
in Europe and China, sometime around 1250. As far as anyone
knows, it took 350 years for someone to combine lenses to
make a telescope. Two Dutch spectacle makers, Hans Lipperhey
and Jacob Metius, may independently have been the first
people to create telescopes by fixing two lenses in a frame
or tube to see long distances. The first telescopes were
used as battlefield tools, but the Italian astronomer Galileo
was the first person to use a telescope to look at the stars.
With this advantage he was the first person to see the craters
on the moon, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings.
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