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The invention of telescopes has changed our view of the world from the center of creation to just a tiny portion of a magnificently huge universe. All of the inventions till date, including the best telescope for amateurs, have offered a spectacular view of the sky and enabled us to ask and answer many questions we were never forced to think of before.
It is believed that magnification of faraway objects is the main use of telescopes, which is partly true. However, the way it functions is far from this simple theory of magnification which is why there are many more important uses of telescopes which are highlighted below.
Collecting Light
The human eye can only collect photons up to a certain limit making their range very limited. An advanced telescope can collect photons over an area as massive as a football field at one time, which goes to show the incredible degree of power modern telescopes have.
The bigger a telescope is constructed, the bigger it has the area to absorb photons and reflect an image back onto the screen with details as perfect as those seen from a magnifying glass, and the farther it can be used to view relative to a smaller one.
Range of Colors
Our eyes detect colors in a very confined portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: the visible light. The frequency through which this range runs through is minute relative to the entire spectrum. Specialized telescopes, however, can view the universe regardless of what kind of light waves it is faced with because they can view through all of the seven main regions.
This ultimately defies the use of a telescope as a magnifying tool only because even if an object was magnified, it would have to be in the visible light spectrum to be viewed. A telescope functions well beyond that limitation.
Fine Details
If one compares the art of using a telescope with that of internal body scans, he/she will be compelled to think that the pictorial presentation that is obtained will be very unclear and will not offer sufficient depth impression of the object(s) being viewed.
A telescope deals with the issue of details of faraway objects like no tool has ever done before. It does not simply use a lens to bend light; it uses the idea of reflection and refraction of light to bring the users a very neatly detailed picture of what they want to look at.
Camera Related Functions
The human eye is very detailed and helps us look at the world in all its beauty, but when you want to capture that beauty, technology has to step in. This is because regardless of how good a team of artists is, it cannot be denied that the process of drawing something takes a long time. In addition, something that is millions of meters far away from land is well, impossible to draw.
Modern telescopes are equipped with cameras that instantly capture pictures of every batch of photons that are reflected back from the surface of the investigated objects. This invention can make them useful as cameras that keep us updated with, for example, the climatic conditions from above the Earths atmosphere in the case of satellites.
Magnification
It may have been bashed a lot in the article but for beginners, the main use of a telescope is, at the end of the day, its ability to help us look beyond. Telescopes for beginners are not as heavily equipped as modern scientific ones with anything more than lenses, but they are still an excellent way to captivate users to think about the beauty of the universe.
