Ciara Young

April 24, 2014

AST 2004
Astronomy Project

Final Project

Invented in 1608 by the Dutch lens maker, Hans Lippershey the telescope
has been the tool in the discovery of everything we know of today in outer space.
There are two types of telescopes that one can buy.

The first type is the

refracting telescope, which uses a glass lenses, and the reflector telescope
which uses mirror instead of lenses. Both of these telescopes accomplish the
same thing, but in two completely different ways.

The objective lens, in

refractors, or main mirror, in reflectors, collects light from a distant object and
brings that light to a point or focus. The eyepiece lens takes the light from the
focus of the objective lens or main mirror and magnifies it. An example of this
would be a magnifying lens. When you combine the objective lens or main mirror
with the eyepiece, you have a telescope. The essential idea is to collect a lot of
light to form a bright image inside the telescope, and then use something like a
magnifying glass to enlarge that image. Telescopes have two general properties;
how well it can collect light and how much it can magnify an image.

The

telescope's magnification is its ability to enlarge an image. This is depending on

the combination of lenses used. The eyepiece performs the magnification and
since almost any telescope can achieve any magnification using different
eyepieces, an aperture is a more important feature than magnification.
To construct this telescope I first started out by separating the pieces
according to the instructions in the pamphlet. I then had to figure out the focal
length of each of the lenses to determine which tube the needed to be placed in.
To start I put the lens on a stand, taped a piece of computer paper to a wall, and
used my phones light to shine through the lens onto the paper. I knew I could
measure the focal length when the light from the lens was focused on the wall.
The calculations I performed are as follows for the eyepiece and the objective
lens: F= 1/((1/a)+(1/a)) where F is the focal length, a is the distance from the
light source to the lens and a is the distance from the lens to the paper on the
wall. To find the magnification of the telescope I took the focal length of the
objective lens and divided it by the focal length of the eyepiece; I attached my
hand written calculations to this paper. Once finished with those calculations, I
placed a blue ring inside of the smaller yellow tube, followed by the eyepiece,
and then the second blue ring to secure the eyepiece in place. Following that I
performed the same procedure with the black rings and the larger yellow tubes.
Then once each yellow tube had its secured pieces inside, I then inserted the
smaller black tube into the bigger one creating the telescope!

Once the

telescope was created me and my assistant took to the tallest parking garage on
campus to test it out. Unfortunately, the moon wasnt out on the night we went to

test it so we used the USF water tower as the focal point for the calculations. I
first started out by calculating the magnifying power of the telescope. I found the
magnifying power to be roughly 10x. I found this by looking at the water tower
through the telescope and with my naked eye and estimated. Next, I had to
calculate the field of view for the telescope. I found this by researching the
height of the water tower and the distance away from the Juniper Poplar parking
garage (the exact calculations are attached). Lastly, I had to find the angular
resolution of the telescope. I did this by estimating the size of the USF logo on
the water tower in comparison to the water tower, and then plugged it into the
equation (again, exact calculations are attached).