Telescopes have had me in their thrall since I was in school. Our school laboratory was equipped with a refracting telescope and my teacher introduced me to that fascinating optical instrument and what I could do with it. He told me about terrestrial telescopes and astronomical ones and how to adjust the focus.
As I was also fascinated by the stars in the sky and my mind wandered sometimes into thinking of how big the universe could be, the telescope could I thought then help me unravel this mystery. However, as I grew older, I learnt that the traditional refracting telescope could not help me much in this endeavor. My teacher had told me that refracting telescopes were beset by distortion of color and other optical issues brought on as the result of refraction of light through media. Of course I found that a refracting telescope was still good enough to observe the craters on the Moon, the Earth's satellite.
However, as I gazed through one deeper into space I found that with more distance, the reflecting telescope was much better. In fact in my research that I conducted in the school library encyclopedia on astronomical laboratories the world over, I found that even they used the reflecting telescope to further their research on stars, black holes, and pulsars.
Our school had I remember very well once even sponsored a trip to the Planetarium in our city. There I was fascinated to view the night sky inside a building with a dome in which there was a huge machine in the center. Our teacher told me that the machine was also a telescope. It focused the image of the night sky on the inside surface of the dome.
The machine gradually swiveled on its axis to enable us to view the changes in the position of the planets and the constellations. A Professor on the podium at the same time told us in detail about the stars, the Planets, and the constellations. I found this very educating and especially the huge machine in the center of the building's arena was both intimidating and alluring.
My fascination with telescopes had grown to sizable proportions by then. I started reading more and more about telescopes and the state of the art among them. I learnt through my considerable reading habit that radio telescopes formed the state of the art telescopes on the Earth. Through their use I learnt that astronomers could search wider expanses of space for recording events of astronomical splendor and significance.
In my reading I came across the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a huge optical instrument launched by the US space shuttle and is positioned outside the Earth's atmosphere in the sky. It helps avoid the distorting effects of the refraction of light due to the atmosphere around the Earth. The Hubble Telescope can see much better and enlighten us better about the secrets the stars and planets otherwise hide from us because of refraction of light through air.
I hope that telescopes will bring on a revolution in the field of astronomy and astrophysics and enable us to know the truth about whether the universe is finite or infinite.
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