How does a refracting, reflecing and radio telescope work?

Question

Please explain in detail for each one. Thanks.

Answer 1

A refractor bends light by using lenses that the light passes through. A reflector bends light by reflecting it off of curved mirrors. A radio telescope is just a radio receiver with a directional antenna. Many of them are the big dish antennas which work exactly like a reflecting optical telescope, but with radio waves. All telescopes bring the light (or radio waves) to a focus, or a single point, where a detector can examine it. The detector may be a camera or your eye, which can examine millions of points at the same time to make an image. In the case of a radio telescope it can only examine the brightness, or radio intensity, of one point at a time, so they have to scan the antenna around an area, measuring the brightness of each "pixel" separately, and use a computer to make an image out of all the measurements.

Answer 2

Optics - microscopes and telescopes all invert the image because if they didnt, it would
mean that another lens had to be added, increasing money cost. A lens is convex on both
sides. That means the middle is thicker than the edges. A microscope or telescope has two
lenses (basically).
The objective lens (usually larger and closer to the specimen or object) which allows the
image of the object to be reduced to a smaller workable image inside the scope.
This image is inverted inside the scope. It is also too small to see with the eye, so you
need another lens, the eyepiece. The eyepiece focus's your eye on the image and magnifies
it so you can see it. Every lens has a focal length, the point at which the image is formed
away from the surface of the lens.

As a lens, a curved mirror also has a focal point. Doing the same thing as a lens, the mirror brings the light image to a point where usually it is them bent to the side or seen by the eypiece at that point. The giant at palomar has the observer seat at the focal point of the mirror and the observer actually rides the scope.

A radio telescope does for radio waves what the reflecting scope does for light, brings the waves to a focal point so they can "hear" even the faint sounds from space. These do not produce any picture image as we may recognize but do produce patterns aligned with frequencies that you may see similar to an osciloscope. These frequecy patterns allow us to determine certain points, like xray sources, or magnetic fields in space.

Answer 3

A refracting telescope uses glass lenses, like binoculars (but only one), a reflecting telescope uses a parabolic mirror to collect, reflect and magnify light and radio telescopes use much longer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, sometimes reflecting into a collector in one large dish, or sometimes using many smaller dishes(called an interferometer) because you can get better results by linking them electronically.