Telescopes and light Lesson 27 of the space course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A telescope is above all a light bucket: its main job is to collect as much light as possible, so faint things show up clearly. 2 Light we see is only one small part of a much wider family of rays, from radio waves to gamma rays, and each kind of telescope "sees" a different part. 3 Air blurs and blocks some light, so big telescopes sit on high dry mountains, and some telescopes go up into space. 4 In 1609-1610 Galileo's homemade telescope showed moons going round Jupiter; today giant mirrors and dishes see galaxies near the edge of the visible universe. 5 In 1609-1610 Galileo used a small homemade telescope to discover four moons of Jupiter, mountains on the Moon and the phases of Venus. 6 Telescopes gather light either with lenses (refractors) or with curved mirrors (reflectors). 7 Isaac Newton built an early working reflecting telescope in 1668. 9 Big telescopes are built on high, dry mountains such as Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Atacama Desert in Chile. 10 The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, orbits above the air, but its mirror was wrongly shaped and astronauts fixed it in 1993. 11 The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, has a gold-coated mirror 6.5 metres wide and works about 1.5 million km from Earth, about four times as far away as the Moon. 12 Light we can see is only a small part of a wider range that includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. 13 Radio telescopes are giant dishes that collect radio waves from space, like the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, 76 metres wide. 14 The Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales helped relay television pictures of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk to the world in 1969. 15 X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes have to work in space, because Earth's atmosphere blocks those rays. 16 The Vera C. 17 Rubin Observatory in Chile released its first images in 2025. 18 The Extremely Large Telescope, with a 39-metre mirror, is being built in Chile and is planned to see first light around 2030. 19 Never look at the Sun through a telescope or binoculars: it can blind you in an instant. ← previous Exoplanets and the search for lifenext → How we know: measuring the sky↑ back to Space This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/