Light and Telescopes
Understanding message of light key to Astronomy
- All knowledge of Universe beyond Earth
- Two basic methods of analyzing light
- Imaging
- take image of object at various wavelengths (colors) and try to make sense out of it
- Telescope acts like a giant camera (photos, TV, etc.)
- many more wavelengths (X-ray, infrared, radio, etc.)
- Spectroscopy
- take objects light and break it up into it’s constituent wavelengths
- like the Red Green Blue colors we can see with our eyes, but many more, finely divided “colors” (wavelengths)
- Determine the nature (chemical composition, temperature, etc.) of unknown, distant object
- used e.g. in remote sensing of Earth from satellites (Ozone hole, etc.)