A lens-based telescope relies on a process called refraction, which is essentially the bending of light when it passes through a different medium. When a lens is fitted inside a telescope ...

For centuries, lenses have worked the same way: curved glass or plastic bending light to bring images into focus. But traditional lenses have a major drawback—the more powerful they need to be ...

This is because the lenses (or mirrors) in the telescope collect natural light and focus it to make things look larger than they are. But a professional telescope can be expensive.

For centuries, lenses have worked the same way: curved glass or plastic bending light to bring images into focus. But traditional lenses have a major drawback—the more powerful they need to be ...

Compound, or catadioptric, telescopes combine lenses and mirrors for a compact option, suitable for both planetary and ...

Power of a Diffraction Space Telescope. This new lens design makes it possible to rethink how a space telescope might be built. In 2019, our team published a concept called the Nautilus Space ...

One astronomer has suggested a possible work-around: Turn the entire Earth into a telescope lens by using the planet’s atmosphere to bend and focus light. When light from stars hits Earth’s ...

With the planet acting as a lens, the focused light would be amplified by a factor of 45,000 during an exposure time of 20 hours. That’s equivalent to the amplification achieved by a ground ...

Though a Fresnel sensor has the same sharpness as a glass lens, it only collects about 10% of the light. That’s why the sheet has to be really really big, like the 30-meter one mentioned above.

The partners in the Solar Gravity Lens Focus mission settled on solar sails as the best way to get the array’s imaging spacecraft out to the jaw-dropping distance of 547 AU (50 billion miles, or ...

But when telescopes must focus light from galaxies millions of light-years away, the bulk of their lenses become impractical. That's why observatory and space-based telescopes rely on massive ...