Telescopes – The Science Shed

Space Based Telescopes

The idea of a space based telescope is not new. Lyman Spitzer first suggested the idea of a telescope in space in 1946. This was 11 years before the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union. His idea suggested that a telescope in space would not be impacted by the atmosphere ofContinue reading “Space Based Telescopes”

Radio Telescopes

Last week I wrote about optical ground based telescopes. In this post we learned about the electromagnetic spectrum and how visible light makes up only part of the spectrum. We also learned that all parts of the spectrum are useful in different ways for astronomy. In this article I am going to focus on theContinue reading “Radio Telescopes”

Ground Based Optical Telescopes

Small amateur telescopes are great for exploring the night sky from our gardens, but what tools do professional astronomers use to explore the universe? The truth is that they use a wide variety of ground based telescopes, space based telescopes as well as other experiments and detectors such as gravitational wave detectors. This post willContinue reading “Ground Based Optical Telescopes”