Photo and Camera

It is important to understand how a telescope functions if you intend to build one yourself. A telescope can magnify images of objects at a distance by using lens to bring them into clear focus. There are various ways you can use to make your own telescope.
Try perusing online sources that teach you how to make telescopes. Many amateurs are experts at building telescopes, and their work meets the same standards of the commercially- built telescopes sold by retailers today. You can also just buy or borrow books about building telescopes.
Here are some instructions you can follow to build a simple telescope. You will need the following things:
• A piece of paper that has printing on its surface
• One ruler
• A pair of scissors
• A colored marker
• Tape (you should use duct tape for best results)
• A long tube made of cardboard (you can get these from your aluminum foil or paper
towel rolls in the kitchen)
• A pair of magnifying lens, with one of stronger magnification strength than the other - you can use lens from old reading glasses or from magnifying glasses for this

1. Get the lens of stronger magnification or that is bigger. Place your printed paper on top of that lens. You should then lay the smaller or weaker lens over the printed paper - your paper should be sandwiched between either lens. You will see blurred printing so you need to gauge the distance when the printing becomes a clear image by shifting the distance of the lenses from the paper until a clear image is achieved. (Get someone to measure the distance for you.)
2. Now take your cardboard tube and slash a large enough slot about one inch from its end which will allow the larger lens to be fitted within it. From that slot, measure the distance you got from Step One above - then cut a slot in which the smaller lens can fit in snugly.
3. Insert the lenses in their slots in the cardboard tube as specified. You can keep them in place by using duct tape (or other tape) to fix them in the slots. If necessary, you may shorten the tube by around two inches from the small lens' slot to make the telescope easier to handle. Peer through your telescope tube to check if your printed paper can be seen clearly through the two lenses. If you need to, adjust the lens.
And now guess what? You have created your own simple yet functional refracting telescope.

There are actually some technicalities that go into buying your first telescope. Many times what people think they want and what they really want are two very different things. Just like with any other large purchase, you have to ask yourself two simple questions:
1. What do you really want to do with your telescope?
2. How much money do you want to spend?

It’s often a good idea to start out small and work your way up to “bigger and better”. If you don’t have much money to invest, you may want to start out with a pair of binoculars. Even the cheap ones will amaze you with how much you can see of the night sky. Binoculars are classified according to their optics (7 x 10 for example). The first number is the magnification factor and the second number is the size in millimeters of the objective lens.
Obviously, the larger the first figure is, the larger the magnification is, but you will have a smaller field of view. The larger the second figure, the more light is gathered by the binoculars and therefore fainter objects become visible.
Seven to ten times magnification is the optimum you should look for in a pair of binoculars for general use. The objective lenses should be between 40mm and 50mm. If there is anything less then the light grasp may be insufficient, anything greater and (apart from the additional expense) the binoculars will start to become too heavy to easily hold by hand.
Many binoculars suitable for astronomical use start in the 7 x 40 to 10 x 50 bracket. If you do decide to buy something larger, say 10 x 70, you will almost certainly have to consider mounting them on a tripod - they will be difficult to hold by hand. Up to 20 times magnification may be considered in a set of binoculars but again, a tripod will become a necessity. In any event do find out if the binoculars have the facility to be tripod mounted - not all of them can!
Binoculars will bring into view the brighter star clusters, galaxies and nebulae. They can be used to help locate an object with a telescope, identifying the chosen target before bringing the telescope to bear on it. Bright variable stars, comets, satellites and large scale night sky features are all well suited to observation with binoculars. The bright planets can also be spotted in twilight with binoculars so overall they are a useful instrument for both the beginner and the experienced astronomer.
A good pair of binoculars will run you anywhere from $50 to $250. Of course, this will depend on where you buy them and your area, but this is a good general number to expect to pay.

A telescope is a device that allows us to bring distant objects closer to us so that we can study them. A good example is the many planets, galaxies, and stars in outer space. Some range from $1 at the toy store to the $1.2 billion Hubble Telescope. There are two types of telescopes. Refractors use a glass lens. Reflectors use mirrors instead of a lens. Let's take the different pieces of a microscope and see how they work. The objective lens in a Refractor or primary mirror in Reflectors gather incoming light and brings it to a focus. The eyepiece takes that same light and magnifies it to take up a large part of the retina of the eye. Thus, it takes a small image and spreads it out to make it look bigger. There are two general principles to any telescope. One is how well it can collect light. The other is the magnification of the image you are viewing. Collecting light is related directly to the diameter of the lens. The more light collected, the brighter the image.
Magnification is the ability to take an object as a far distance and enlarge it so you can see it clearly. Any magnification can be obtained by using different eyepieces depending on the object you are trying to view.
Here is a simplified explanation. Obtain two magnifying glasses and a piece of paper. Hold one of the glasses between you and the paper. At this point, the image will be blurry and unreadable. Take the second glass and place between your eyes and the first glass. Moving the second glass up or down should bring the piece of paper into view. It will be larger and upside down though. Give it a try and see what happens.

In 1609, an Italian mathematician named Galileo Galilee peered through an odd new device he had invented to look at the stars in the night sky. Suddenly, this well known and familiar place revealed itself as a barely exposed mystery. It was then that Galileo knew this was a ground breaking device.
The moon is a gray-white orb to the naked eye. Looking through this new instrument, Galileo was able to see shadows and bright spots on the surface of the moon. He could see that the moon also had mountains and valleys.
At the time, the planets were thought to be odd stars that “wandered” the sky. Through Galileo’s device, he could see that the planets were accompanied by moving pinpoints of lights which were moons of their own! Galileo quickly published his discoveries in a bulletin he titled “Message from the Stars”. His claims, at first, were met with wonder and excitement. He presented his new device to the leaders of the time including the Catholic Church in Rome. Eventually this device would be named “telescopio”. In Greek, telescopio means “to see at a distance”. This would eventually evolve into the word telescope, but it certainly was an apt name for this new invention. Galileo’s telescope was a simple instrument compared with the ones we use today. It was a tube with two lenses: the convex primary lens that curved outward and the concave eyepiece lens that curved inward. He built the device after hearing about the newly invented spyglass which was an instrument used by the military to peer into enemy camps.
This first telescope used the same principle that all telescopes would eventually rely on. That principle held that the combination of the two lenses gathered more light than the human eye could collect on its own. The lenses would focus that light and form an image. Because the image was formed by the bending of light, or refraction, these telescopes came to be known as refracting telescopes, or simply, refractors.
Galileo’s best telescope magnified objects about thirty times. Because of flaws in its design such as the shape of the lens, the images tended to be blurry and distorted. However, the early telescope was good enough for Galileo to explore the sky.
Even though the introduction of the telescope was met with excitement, as his investigations progressed, Galileo began to make enemies. Some people argued that the telescope made people see illusions. Others claimed that the planets’ details couldn’t be seen with the naked eye and therefore didn’t matter.
The hostility arose from a dispute about the way the universe worked. After all, this was a radical new concept that refuted the accepted norm of how people looked at the world. Remember at one time, people thought the world was flat until Christopher Columbus provided proof that it wasn’t! At the time, one belief about the universe was outlined by the astronomer Ptolemy a long time prior. His belief was that the Earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around it. Another astronomer, Copernicus, put the sun in the center of the universe.
The politically powerful Catholic Church promoted the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe. They also believed that the celestial bodies were perfect spheres – smooth and round devoid of any mountains or valleys. You can imagine the controversy the telescope generated with the new theories Galileo was putting forth.
In fact, Galileo was uncovering evidence supporting the Copernican theory. For instance, he saw that Venus has phases just like the moon which showed that the planet was moving around the sun and not the Earth. Also, he could see that Jupiter’s moons were clearly moving around Jupiter and not Earth.