Do you ever look into space and wonder, how can scientists see what my own eye can’t see, well by now most people know that all you need is a telescope and you can see much further than what the human eye can see. However did you know that scientists also use what are called non optical telescopes? These telescopes do not magnify images, they pick up waves that are not visible to the naked human eye at all. Some examples of these are; x-ray telescopes, microwave telescopes and inferred telescopes just to name a few. However we will be focusing on radio telescopes and how they differ from the regular optical telescopes. Figure 1 an x-ray telescope Figure 2 a microwave telescope Firstly let’s go over the basics for anyone who doesn’t know much about how optical telescopes work. Put simply; imagine having eyes as big as your fist, you would look funny but a lot more light would be able to enter your eyes, this is effectively what telescopes do, they enlarge the area that light enters bringing in more light into our eyes so that we are able to see more distant objects in more detail. Telescopes work using lenses, they have two lenses that magnify the image by stretching out over more pixels on your retina. The objective lens (in refracting telescopes) or the primary mirror (in reflectors) collect a lot more light from a …show more content…
As seen below in figure 3 it is an incredibly clear image that is produced. This is because it is bypassing anything like clouds, pollution or large star masses in space else that could get in the way like pollution. However it also means that the telescope can pick up other unwanted radio waves and cause interference. This is one of the reasons why there are strict laws on using radio wave