Astronomical spectroscopy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Star-Spectroscope of the Lick Observatory in 1898. Designed by James Keeler and constructed by John Brashear.

Astronomical spectroscopy is the study of astronomy using the techniques of spectroscopy to measure the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light and radio, which radiates from stars and other celestial objects. A stellar spectrum can reveal many properties of stars, such as their chemical composition, temperature, density, mass, distance, luminosity, and relative motion using Doppler shift measurements. Spectroscopy is also used to study the physical properties of many other types of celestial objects such as planets, nebulae, galaxies, and active galactic nuclei.

Background

Electromagnetic transmittance, or opacity, of the Earth's atmosphere

Astronomical spectroscopy is used to measure three major bands of radiation: visible spectrum, radio, and X-ray. While all spectroscopy looks at specific areas of the spectrum, different methods are required to acquire the signal depending on the frequency. Ozone (O₃) and molecular oxygen (O₂) absorb light with wavelengths under 300 nm, meaning that X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy require the use of a satellite telescope or rocket mounted detectors. Radio signals have much longer wavelengths than optical signals, and require the use of antennas or radio dishes. Infrared light is absorbed by atmospheric water and carbon dioxide, so while the equipment is similar to that used in optical spectroscopy, satellites are required to record much of the infrared spectrum.

Optical spectroscopy

Incident light reflects at the same angle (black lines), but a small portion of the light is refracted as coloured light (red and blue lines).

Physicists have been looking at the solar spectrum since Isaac Newton first used a simple prism to observe the refractive properties of light. In the early 1800s Joseph von Fraunhofer used his skills as a glass maker to create very pure prisms, which allowed him to observe 574 dark lines in a seemingly continuous spectrum. Soon after this, he combined telescope and prism to observe the spectrum of Venus, the Moon, Mars, and various stars such as Betelgeuse; his company continued to manufacture and sell high-quality refracting telescopes based on his original designs until its closure in 1884.

The resolution of a prism is limited by its size; a larger prism will provide a more detailed spectrum, but the increase in mass makes it unsuitable for highly detailed work. This issue was resolved in the early 1900s with the development of high-quality reflection gratings by J.S. Plaskett at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, Canada. Light striking a mirror will reflect at the same angle, however a small portion of the light will be refracted at a different angle; this is dependent upon the indices of refraction of the materials and the wavelength of the light. By creating a "blazed" grating which utilizes a large number of parallel mirrors, the small portion of light can be focused and visualized. These new spectroscopes were more detailed than a prism, required less light, and could be focused on a specific region of the spectrum by tilting the grating.

The limitation to a blazed grating is the width of the mirrors, which can only be ground a finite amount before focus is lost; the maximum is around 1000 lines/mm. In order to overcome this limitation holographic gratings were developed. Volume phase holographic gratings use a thin film of dichromated gelatin on a glass surface, which is subsequently exposed to a wave pattern created by an interferometer. This wave pattern sets up a reflection pattern similar to the blazed gratings but utilizing Bragg diffraction, a process where the angle of reflection is dependent on the arrangement of the atoms in the gelatin. The holographic gratings can have up to 6000 lines/mm and can be up to twice as efficient in collecting light as blazed gratings. Because they are sealed between two sheets of glass, the holographic gratings are very versatile, potentially lasting decades before needing replacement.

Light dispersed by the grating or prism in a spectrograph can be recorded by a detector. Historically, photographic plates were widely used to record spectra until electronic detectors were developed, and today optical spectrographs most often employ charge-coupled devices (CCDs). The wavelength scale of a spectrum can be calibrated by observing the spectrum of emission lines of known wavelength from a gas-discharge lamp. The flux scale of a spectrum can be calibrated as a function of wavelength by comparison with an observation of a standard star with corrections for atmospheric absorption of light; this is known as spectrophotometry.

Radio spectroscopy

Radio astronomy was founded with the work of Karl Jansky in the early 1930s, while working for Bell Labs. He built a radio antenna to look at potential sources of interference for transatlantic radio transmissions. One of the sources of noise discovered came not from Earth, but from the center of the Milky Way, in the constellation Sagittarius. In 1942, JS Hey captured the sun's radio frequency using military radar receivers. Radio spectroscopy started with the discovery of the 21-centimeter H I line in 1951.

Radio interferometry was pioneered in 1946, when Joseph Lade Pawsey, Ruby Payne-Scott and Lindsay McCready used a single antenna atop a sea cliff to observe 200 MHz solar radiation. Two incident beams, one directly from the sun and the other reflected from the sea surface, generated the necessary interference. The first multi-receiver interferometer was built in the same year by Martin Ryle and Vonberg. In 1960, Ryle and Antony Hewish published the technique of aperture synthesis to analyze interferometer data. The aperture synthesis process, which involves autocorrelating and discrete Fourier transforming the incoming signal, recovers both the spatial and frequency variation in flux. The result is a 3D image whose third axis is frequency. For this work, Ryle and Hewish were jointly awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Stars and their properties

Continuous spectrum

Emission lines (discrete spectrum)

Absorption lines (discrete spectrum)

Chemical properties

Newton used a prism to split white light into a spectrum of color, and Fraunhofer's high-quality prisms allowed scientists to see dark lines of an unknown origin. In the 1850s, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen described the phenomena behind these dark lines. Hot solid objects produce light with a continuous spectrum, hot gases emit light at specific wavelengths, and hot solid objects surrounded by cooler gases show a near-continuous spectrum with dark lines corresponding to the emission lines of the gases. By comparing the absorption lines of the sun with emission spectra of known gases, the chemical composition of stars can be determined.

The major Fraunhofer lines, and the elements with which they are associated, appear in the following table. Designations from the early Balmer Series are shown in parentheses.

Designation Element Wavelength (nm) y O2 898.765 Z O2 822.696 A O2 759.370 B O2 686.719 C (Hα) H 656.281 a O2 627.661 D1 Na 589.592 D2 Na 588.995 D3 or d He 587.5618 e Hg 546.073 E2 Fe 527.039 b1 Mg 518.362 b2 Mg 517.270 b3 Fe 516.891 b4 Mg 516.733

Designation Element Wavelength (nm) c Fe 495.761 F (Hβ) H 486.134 d Fe 466.814 e Fe 438.355 G' (Hγ) H 434.047 G Fe 430.790 G Ca 430.774 h (Hδ) H 410.175 H Ca+ 396.847 K Ca+ 393.368 L Fe 382.044 N Fe 358.121 P Ti+ 336.112 T Fe 302.108 t Ni 299.444

Not all of the elements in the sun were immediately identified. Two examples are listed below.

• In 1868 Norman Lockyer and Pierre Janssen independently observed a line next to the sodium doublet (D₁ and D₂) which Lockyer determined to be a new element. He named it Helium, but it wasn't until 1895 the element was found on Earth.
• In 1869 the astronomers Charles Augustus Young and William Harkness independently observed a novel green emission line in the Sun's corona during an eclipse. This "new" element was incorrectly named coronium, as it was only found in the corona. It was not until the 1930s that Walter Grotrian and Bengt Edlén discovered that the spectral line at 530.3 nm was due to highly ionized iron (Fe¹³⁺). Other unusual lines in the coronal spectrum are also caused by highly charged ions, such as nickel and calcium, the high ionization being due to the extreme temperature of the solar corona.

To date more than 20 000 absorption lines have been listed for the Sun between 293.5 and 877.0 nm, yet only approximately 75% of these lines have been linked to elemental absorption.

By analyzing the width of each spectral line in an emission spectrum, both the elements present in a star and their relative abundances can be determined. Using this information stars can be categorized into stellar populations; Population I stars are the youngest stars and have the highest metal content (our Sun is a Pop I star), while Population III stars are the oldest stars with a very low metal content.

Temperature and size

Black body curves for various temperatures.

In 1860 Gustav Kirchhoff proposed the idea of a black body, a material that emits electromagnetic radiation at all wavelengths. In 1894 Wilhelm Wien derived an expression relating the temperature (T) of a black body to its peak emission wavelength (λ_max).

${\displaystyle \lambda _{\text{max}}T=b}$

b is a constant of proportionality called Wien's displacement constant, equal to 2.8977729(17)×10⁻³ m⋅K. This equation is called Wien's Law. By measuring the peak wavelength of a star, the surface temperature can be determined. For example, if the peak wavelength of a star is 502 nm the corresponding temperature will be 5778 kelvins.

The luminosity of a star is a measure of the electromagnetic energy output in a given amount of time. Luminosity (L) can be related to the temperature (T) of a star by

${\displaystyle L=4\pi R^{2}\sigma T^{4}}$ ,

where R is the radius of the star and σ is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant, with a value of 5.670367(13)×10⁻⁸ W⋅m⁻²⋅K⁻⁴. Thus, when both luminosity and temperature are known (via direct measurement and calculation) the radius of a star can be determined.

Galaxies

The spectra of galaxies look similar to stellar spectra, as they consist of the combined light of millions of stars.

Doppler shift studies of galaxy clusters by Fritz Zwicky in 1937 found that most galaxies were moving much faster than seemed to be possible from what was known about the mass of the cluster. Zwicky hypothesized that there must be a great deal of non-luminous matter in the galaxy clusters, which became known as dark matter. Since his discovery, astronomers have determined that a large portion of galaxies (and most of the universe) is made up of dark matter. In 2003, however, four galaxies (NGC 821, NGC 3379, NGC 4494, and NGC 4697) were found to have little to no dark matter influencing the motion of the stars contained within them; the reason behind the lack of dark matter is unknown.

In the 1950s, strong radio sources were found to be associated with very dim, very red objects. When the first spectrum of one of these objects was taken there were absorption lines at wavelengths where none were expected. It was soon realised that what was observed was a normal galactic spectrum, but highly red shifted. These were named quasi-stellar radio sources, or quasars, by Hong-Yee Chiu in 1964. Quasars are now thought to be galaxies formed in the early years of our universe, with their extreme energy output powered by super-massive black holes.

The properties of a galaxy can also be determined by analyzing the stars found within them. NGC 4550, a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, has a large portion of its stars rotating in the opposite direction as the other portion. It is believed that the galaxy is the combination of two smaller galaxies that were rotating in opposite directions to each other. Bright stars in galaxies can also help determine the distance to a galaxy, which may be a more accurate method than parallax or standard candles.

Interstellar medium

The interstellar medium is matter that occupies the space between star systems in a galaxy. 99% of this matter is gaseous - hydrogen, helium, and smaller quantities of other ionized elements such as oxygen. The other 1% is dust particles, thought to be mainly graphite, silicates, and ices. Clouds of the dust and gas are referred to as nebulae.

There are three main types of nebula: absorption, reflection, and emission nebulae. Absorption (or dark) nebulae are made of dust and gas in such quantities that they obscure the starlight behind them, making photometry difficult. Reflection nebulae, as their name suggest, reflect the light of nearby stars. Their spectra are the same as the stars surrounding them, though the light is bluer; shorter wavelengths scatter better than longer wavelengths. Emission nebulae emit light at specific wavelengths depending on their chemical composition.

Gaseous emission nebulae

In the early years of astronomical spectroscopy, scientists were puzzled by the spectrum of gaseous nebulae. In 1864 William Huggins noticed that many nebulae showed only emission lines rather than a full spectrum like stars. From the work of Kirchhoff, he concluded that nebulae must contain "enormous masses of luminous gas or vapour." However, there were several emission lines that could not be linked to any terrestrial element, brightest among them lines at 495.9 nm and 500.7 nm. These lines were attributed to a new element, nebulium, until Ira Bowen determined in 1927 that the emission lines were from highly ionised oxygen (O⁺²). These emission lines could not be replicated in a laboratory because they are forbidden lines; the low density of a nebula (one atom per cubic centimetre) allows for metastable ions to decay via forbidden line emission rather than collisions with other atoms.

Not all emission nebulae are found around or near stars where solar heating causes ionisation. The majority of gaseous emission nebulae are formed of neutral hydrogen. In the ground state neutral hydrogen has two possible spin states: the electron has either the same spin or the opposite spin of the proton. When the atom transitions between these two states, it releases an emission or absorption line of 21 cm. This line is within the radio range and allows for very precise measurements:

• Velocity of the cloud can be measured via Doppler shift
• The intensity of the 21 cm line gives the density and number of atoms in the cloud
• The temperature of the cloud can be calculated

Using this information the shape of the Milky Way has been determined to be a spiral galaxy, though the exact number and position of the spiral arms is the subject of ongoing research.

Complex molecules

Dust and molecules in the interstellar medium not only obscures photometry, but also causes absorption lines in spectroscopy. Their spectral features are generated by transitions of component electrons between different energy levels, or by rotational or vibrational spectra. Detection usually occurs in radio, microwave, or infrared portions of the spectrum. The chemical reactions that form these molecules can happen in cold, diffuse clouds or in the hot ejecta around a white dwarf star from a nova or supernova. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as acetylene (C₂H₂) generally group together to form graphites or other sooty material, but other organic molecules such as acetone ((CH₃)₂CO) and buckminsterfullerenes (C₆₀ and C₇₀) have been discovered.

Motion in the universe

Redshift and blueshift

Stars and interstellar gas are bound by gravity to form galaxies, and groups of galaxies can be bound by gravity in galaxy clusters. With the exception of stars in the Milky Way and the galaxies in the Local Group, almost all galaxies are moving away from us due to the expansion of the universe.

Doppler effect and redshift

The motion of stellar objects can be determined by looking at their spectrum. Because of the Doppler effect, objects moving towards us are blueshifted, and objects moving away are redshifted. The wavelength of redshifted light is longer, appearing redder than the source. Conversely, the wavelength of blueshifted light is shorter, appearing bluer than the source light:

${\displaystyle {\frac {\lambda -\lambda _{0}}{\lambda _{0}}}={\frac {v_{0}}{c}}}$

where ${\displaystyle \lambda _{0}}$ is the emitted wavelength, ${\displaystyle v_{0}}$ is the velocity of the object, and ${\displaystyle \lambda }$ is the observed wavelength. Note that v < 0 corresponds to λ < λ₀, a blueshifted wavelength. A redshifted absorption or emission line will appear more towards the red end of the spectrum than a stationary line. In 1913 Vesto Slipher determined the Andromeda Galaxy was blueshifted, meaning it was moving towards the Milky Way. He recorded the spectra of 20 other galaxies — all but 4 of which were redshifted — and was able to calculate their velocities relative to the Earth. Edwin Hubble would later use this information, as well as his own observations, to define Hubble's law: The further a galaxy is from the Earth, the faster it is moving away from us. Hubble's law can be generalised to

${\displaystyle v=H_{0}d}$

where ${\displaystyle v}$ is the velocity (or Hubble Flow), ${\displaystyle H_{0}}$ is the Hubble Constant, and ${\displaystyle d}$ is the distance from Earth.

Redshift (z) can be expressed by the following equations:

Calculation of redshift, ${\displaystyle z}$

Based on wavelength	Based on frequency
${\displaystyle z={\frac {\lambda _{\mathrm {obsv} }-\lambda _{\mathrm {emit} }}{\lambda _{\mathrm {emit} }}}}$	${\displaystyle z={\frac {f_{\mathrm {emit} }-f_{\mathrm {obsv} }}{f_{\mathrm {obsv} }}}}$
${\displaystyle 1+z={\frac {\lambda _{\mathrm {obsv} }}{\lambda _{\mathrm {emit} }}}}$	${\displaystyle 1+z={\frac {f_{\mathrm {emit} }}{f_{\mathrm {obsv} }}}}$

In these equations, frequency is denoted by ${\displaystyle f}$ and wavelength by ${\displaystyle \lambda }$. The larger the value of z, the more redshifted the light and the farther away the object is from the Earth. As of January 2013, the largest galaxy redshift of z~12 was found using the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, corresponding to an age of over 13 billion years (the universe is approximately 13.82 billion years old).

The Doppler effect and Hubble's law can be combined to form the equation ${\displaystyle z={\frac {v_{\text{Hubble}}}{c}}}$, where c is the speed of light.

Peculiar motion

Objects that are gravitationally bound will rotate around a common center of mass. For stellar bodies, this motion is known as peculiar velocity, and can alter the Hubble Flow. Thus, an extra term for the peculiar motion needs to be added to Hubble's law:

${\displaystyle v_{\text{total}}=H_{0}d+v_{\mathrm {pec} }}$

This motion can cause confusion when looking at a solar or galactic spectrum, because the expected redshift based on the simple Hubble law will be obscured by the peculiar motion. For example, the shape and size of the Virgo Cluster has been a matter of great scientific scrutiny due to the very large peculiar velocities of the galaxies in the cluster.

Binary stars

Two stars of different size orbiting the center of mass. The spectrum can be seen to split depending on the position and velocity of the stars.

Just as planets can be gravitationally bound to stars, pairs of stars can orbit each other. Some binary stars are visual binaries, meaning they can be observed orbiting each other through a telescope. Some binary stars, however, are too close together to be resolved. These two stars, when viewed through a spectrometer, will show a composite spectrum: the spectrum of each star will be added together. This composite spectrum becomes easier to detect when the stars are of similar luminosity and of different spectral class.

Spectroscopic binaries can be also detected due to their radial velocity; as they orbit around each other one star may be moving towards the Earth whilst the other moves away, causing a Doppler shift in the composite spectrum. The orbital plane of the system determines the magnitude of the observed shift: if the observer is looking perpendicular to the orbital plane there will be no observed radial velocity. For example, if you look at a carousel from the side, you will see the animals moving toward and away from you, whereas if you look from directly above they will only be moving in the horizontal plane.

Planets, asteroids, and comets

Planets, asteroids, and comets all reflect light from their parent stars and emit their own light. For cooler objects, including solar-system planets and asteroids, most of the emission is at infrared wavelengths we cannot see, but that are routinely measured with spectrometers. For objects surrounded by gas, such as comets and planets with atmospheres, further emission and absorption happens at specific wavelengths in the gas, imprinting the spectrum of the gas on that of the solid object. In the case of worlds with thick atmospheres or complete cloud cover (such as the gas giants, Venus, and Saturn's satellite Titan (moon)), the spectrum is mostly or completely due to the atmosphere alone.

Planets

The reflected light of a planet contains absorption bands due to minerals in the rocks present for rocky bodies, or due to the elements and molecules present in the atmosphere. To date over 3,500 exoplanets have been discovered. These include so-called Hot Jupiters, as well as Earth-like planets. Using spectroscopy, compounds such as alkali metals, water vapor, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane have all been discovered.

Asteroids

Asteroids can be classified into three major types according to their spectra. The original categories were created by Clark R. Chapman, David Morrison, and Ben Zellner in 1975, and further expanded by David J. Tholen in 1984. In what is now known as the Tholen classification, the C-types are made of carbonaceous material, S-types consist mainly of silicates, and X-types are 'metallic'. There are other classifications for unusual asteroids. C- and S-type asteroids are the most common asteroids. In 2002 the Tholen classification was further "evolved" into the SMASS classification, expanding the number of categories from 14 to 26 to account for more precise spectroscopic analysis of the asteroids.

Comets

Optical spectrum of Comet Hyakutake.

The spectra of comets consist of a reflected solar spectrum from the dusty clouds surrounding the comet, as well as emission lines from gaseous atoms and molecules excited to fluorescence by sunlight and/or chemical reactions. For example, the chemical composition of Comet ISON was determined by spectroscopy due to the prominent emission lines of cyanogen (CN), as well as two- and three-carbon atoms (C₂ and C₃). Nearby comets can even be seen in X-ray as solar wind ions flying to the coma are neutralized. The cometary X-ray spectra therefore reflect the state of the solar wind rather than that of the comet.

Astrophotography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An image of Orion's Belt composited from digitized black-and-white photographic plates recorded through red and blue astronomical filters, with a computer synthesized green channel. The plates were taken using the Samuel Oschin Telescope between 1987 and 1991.

Astrophotography is a specialized type of photography for recording photos of astronomical objects, celestial events, and areas of the night sky. The first photograph of an astronomical object (the Moon) was taken in 1840, but it was not until the late 19th century that advances in technology allowed for detailed stellar photography. Besides being able to record the details of extended objects such as the Moon, Sun, and planets, astrophotography has the ability to image objects invisible to the human eye such as dim stars, nebulae, and galaxies. This is done by long time exposure since both film and digital cameras can accumulate and sum light photons over these long periods of time.

Photography revolutionized the field of professional astronomical research, with longtime exposures recording hundreds of thousands of new stars and nebulae that were invisible to the human eye, leading to specialized and ever larger optical telescopes that were essentially big cameras designed to record light using photographic plates. Astrophotography had an early role in sky surveys and star classification but over time it has given way to more sophisticated equipment and techniques designed for specific fields of scientific research, with image sensors becoming just one of many forms of sensor.

Today, astrophotography is mostly a subdiscipline in amateur astronomy, usually seeking aesthetically pleasing images rather than scientific data.  Amateurs use a wide range of special equipment and techniques.

Overview

The large 48" Oschin Schmidt Camera at Palomar Observatory

With a few exceptions, astronomical photography employs long exposures since both film and digital imaging devices can accumulate and light photons over long periods of time. The amount of light hitting the film or detector is also increased by increasing the diameter of the primary optics (the objective) being used. Urban areas produce light pollution so equipment and observatories doing astronomical imaging are often located in remote locations to allow long exposures without the film or detectors being swamped with stray light.

Since the Earth is constantly rotating, telescopes and equipment are rotated in the opposite direction to follow the apparent motion of the stars overhead (called diurnal motion). This is accomplished by using either equatorial or computer-controlled altazimuth telescope mounts to keep celestial objects centered while the earth rotates. All telescope mount systems suffer from induced tracking errors due to imperfect motor drives, mechanical sag of the telescope and atmospheric refraction. Tracking errors are corrected by keeping a selected aiming point, usually a guide star, centered during the entire exposure. Sometimes (as in the case of comets) the object to be imaged is moving, so the telescope has to be kept constantly centered on that object. This guiding is done through a second co-mounted telescope called a "guide scope" or via some type of "off-axis guider", a device with a prism or optical beam splitter that allows the observer to view the same image in the telescope that is taking the picture. Guiding was formerly done manually throughout the exposure with an observer standing at (or riding inside) the telescope making corrections to keep a cross hair on the guide star. Since the advent of computer-controlled systems this is accomplished by an automated systems in professional and even amateur equipment.

Astronomical photography was one of the earliest types of scientific photography and almost from its inception it diversified into subdisciplines that each have a specific goal including star cartography, astrometry, stellar classification, photometry, spectroscopy, polarimetry, and the discovery of astronomical objects such as asteroids, meteors, comets, variable stars, novae, and even unknown planets. These often require specialized equipment such as telescopes designed for precise imaging, for wide field of view (such as Schmidt cameras), or for work at specific wavelengths of light.  Astronomical CCD cameras may cool the sensor to reduce thermal noise and to allow the detector to record images in other spectra such as in infrared astronomy. Specialized filters are also used to record images in specific wavelengths.

History

Henry Draper with a refractor telescope set up for photography (photo probably taken in the 1860s or early 1870).

The development of astrophotography as a scientific tool was pioneered in the mid-19th century for the most part by experimenters and amateur astronomers, or so-called "gentleman scientists" (although, as in other scientific fields, these were not always men). Because of the very long exposures needed to capture relatively faint astronomical objects, many technological problems had to be overcome. These included making telescopes rigid enough so they wouldn’t sag out of focus during the exposure, building clock drives that could rotate the telescope mount at a constant rate, and developing ways to accurately keep a telescope aimed at a fixed point over a long period of time. Early photographic processes also had limitations. The daguerreotype process was far too slow to record anything but the brightest objects, and the wet plate collodion process limited exposures to the time the plate could stay wet.

The first-known attempt at astronomical photography was by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype process which bears his name, who attempted in 1839 to photograph the Moon. Tracking errors in guiding the telescope during the long exposure meant the photograph came out as an indistinct fuzzy spot. John William Draper, New York University Professor of Chemistry, physician and scientific experimenter managed to make the first successful photograph of the moon a year later on March 23, 1840, taking a 20-minute-long daguerreotype image using a 5-inch (13 cm) reflecting telescope.

The Sun may have been first photographed in an 1845 daguerreotype by the French physicists Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau. A failed attempt to obtain a photograph of a Total Eclipse of the Sun was made by the Italian physicist, Gian Alessandro Majocchi during an eclipse of the Sun that took place in his home city of Milan, on July 8, 1842. He later gave an account of his attempt and the Daguerreotype photographs he obtained, in which he wrote

"...a few minutes before and after totality an iodized plate was exposed in a camera to the light of the thin crescent, and a distinct image was obtained; but another plate exposed to the light of the corona for two minutes during totality did not show the slightest trace of photographic action. No photographic alteration was caused by the light of the corona condensed by a lens for two minutes, during totality, on a sheet of paper prepared with bromide of silver."

The first solar eclipse photograph taken on July 28, 1851 by a daguerrotypist named Berkowski.

The Sun's solar corona was first successfully imaged during the Solar eclipse of July 28, 1851. Dr. August Ludwig Busch, the Director of the Königsberg Observatory gave instructions for a local daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski to image the eclipse. Busch himself was not present at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), but preferred to observe the eclipse from nearby Rixhoft. The telescope used by Berkowski was attached to 6 ¹⁄₂-inch (17 cm) Königsberg heliometer and had an aperture of only 2.4 in (6.1 cm), and a focal length of 32 in (81 cm). Commencing immediately after the beginning of totality, Berkowski exposed a daguerreotype plate for 84 seconds in the focus of the telescope, and on development an image of the corona was obtained. He also exposed a second plate for about 40 to 45 seconds but was spoiled when the sun broke out from behind the moon. More detailed photographic studies of the Sun were made by the British astronomer Warren De la Rue starting in 1861.

The first photograph of a star was a daguerreotype of the star Vega by astronomer William Cranch Bond and daguerreotype photographer and experimenter John Adams Whipple, on July 16 and 17, 1850 with Harvard College Observatory's 15 inch Great refractor. In 1863 the English chemist William Allen Miller and English amateur astronomer Sir William Huggins used the wet collodion plate process to obtain the first ever photographic spectrogram of a star, Sirius and Capella. In 1872 American physician Henry Draper, the son of John William Draper, recorded the first spectrogram of a star (Vega) to show absorption lines.

Henry Draper's 1880 photograph of the Orion Nebula, the first ever taken.

 

One of Andrew Ainslie Common's 1883 photographs of the same nebula, the first to show that a long exposure could record stars and nebulae invisible to the human eye.

Astronomical photography did not become a serious research tool until the late 19th century, with the introduction of dry plate photography. It was first used by Sir William Huggins and his wife Margaret Lindsay Huggins, in 1876, in their work to record the spectra of astronomical objects. In 1880 Henry Draper used the new dry plate process with photographically corrected 11 in (28 cm) refracting telescope made by Alvan Clark to make a 51-minute exposure of the Orion Nebula, the first photograph of a nebula ever made. A breakthrough in astronomical photography came in 1883, when amateur astronomer Andrew Ainslie Common used the dry plate process to record several images of the same nebula in exposures up to 60 minutes with a 36 in (91 cm) reflecting telescope that he constructed in the backyard of his home in Ealing, outside London. These images for the first time showed stars too faint to be seen by the human eye.

The first all-sky photographic astrometry project, Astrographic Catalogue and Carte du Ciel, was started in 1887. It was conducted by 20 observatories all using special photographic telescopes with a uniform design called normal astrographs, all with an aperture of around 13 in (330 mm) and a focal length of 11 ft (3.4 m), designed to create images with a uniform scale on the photographic plate of approximately 60 arcsecs/mm while covering a 2° × 2° field of view. The attempt was to accurately map the sky down to the 14th magnitude but it was never completed.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the worldwide construction of refracting telescopes and sophisticated large reflecting telescopes specifically designed for photographic imaging. Towards the middle of the century, giant telescopes such as the 200 in (5.1 m) Hale Telescope and the 48 in (120 cm) Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory were pushing the limits of film photography.

Some progress was made in the field of photographic emulsions and in the techniques of forming gas hypersensitization, cryogenic cooling, and light amplification, but starting in the 1970s after the invention of the CCD, photographic plates were gradually replaced by electronic imaging in professional and amateur observatories. CCD's are far more light sensitive, do not drop off in sensitivity over long exposures the way film does ("reciprocity failure"), have the ability to record in a much wider spectral range, and simplify storage of information. Telescopes now use many configurations of CCD sensors including linear arrays and large mosaics of CCD elements equivalent to 100 million pixels, designed to cover the focal plane of telescopes that formerly used 10–14-inch (25–36 cm) photographic plates.

The late 20th century saw advances in astronomical imaging take place in the form of new hardware, with the construction of giant multi-mirror and segmented mirror telescopes. It would also see the introduction of space based telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Operating outside the atmosphere’s turbulence, scattered ambient light and the vagaries of weather allows the Hubble Space Telescope, with a mirror diameter of 2.4 metres (94 in), to record stars down to the 30th magnitude, some 100 times dimmer than what the 5-meter Mount Palomar Hale telescope could record in 1949.

Amateur astrophotography

2 minute time exposure of the comet Hale-Bopp imaged using a camera on a fixed tripod. The tree in the foreground was illuminated using a small flashlight.

Astrophotography is a popular hobby among photographers and amateur astronomers. Images of the night sky can be obtained with the most basic film and digital cameras. For simple star trails, no additional equipment may be necessary other than common tripods. There is a wide range of commercial equipment geared toward basic and advanced astrophotography. Amateur astronomers and amateur telescope makers also use homemade equipment and modified devices.

Media

Images are recorded on many types of media and imaging devices including single-lens reflex cameras, 35 mm film, digital single-lens reflex cameras, simple amateur-level and professional-level commercially manufactured astronomical CCD cameras, video cameras, and even off-the-shelf webcams adapted for long-exposure imaging.

Conventional over-the-counter film has long been used for astrophotography. Film exposures range from seconds to over an hour. Commercially available color film stock is subject to reciprocal failure over long exposures, in which sensitivity to light of different wavelengths appears to drop off at different rates as the exposure time increases, leading to a color shift in the image. This is compensated for by using the same technique used in professional astronomy of taking photographs at different wavelengths that are then combined to create a correct color image. Since film is much slower than digital sensors, tiny errors in tracking can be corrected without much noticeable effect on the final image. Film astrophotography is becoming less popular due to the lower ongoing costs, greater sensitivity and the convenience of digital photography.

Play media

Video of night sky made with DSLR camera's time-lapse feature. Photographer added camera movement (motion control) making the camera track in a random direction off the normal equatorial axis.

Since the late 1990s amateurs have been following the professional observatories in the switch from film to digital CCDs for astronomical imaging. CCDs are more sensitive than film, allowing much shorter exposure times, and have a linear response to light. Images can be captured in many short exposures to create a synthetic long exposure. Digital cameras also have minimal or no moving parts and the ability to be operated remotely via an infrared remote or computer tethering, limiting vibration. Simple digital devices such as webcams can be modified to allow access to the focal plane and even (after the cutting of a few wires), for long exposure photography. Digital video cameras are also used. There are many techniques and pieces of commercially manufactured equipment for attaching digital single lens reflex(DSLR) cameras and even basic point and shoot cameras to telescopes. Consumer level digital cameras suffer from image noise over long exposures, so there are many techniques for cooling the camera, including cryogenic cooling. Astronomical equipment companies also now offer a wide range of purpose-built astronomical CCD cameras complete with hardware and processing software. Many commercially available DSLR cameras have the ability to take long time exposures combined with sequential (time-lapse) images allowing the photographer to create a motion picture of the night sky.

Post-processing

The Pleiades Star Cluster photographed with a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera connected to a 80mm refracting telescope piggybacked on a larger telescope. Image is made from seven 180 second images combined and processed in Photoshop with a noise reduction plugin.

Both digital camera images and scanned film images are usually adjusted in image processing software to improve the image in some way. Images can be brightened and manipulated in a computer to adjust color and increase the contrast. More sophisticated techniques involve capturing multiple images (sometimes thousands) to composite together in an additive process to sharpen images to overcome atmospheric seeing, negating tracking issues, bringing out faint objects with a poor signal-to-noise ratio, and filtering out light pollution. Digital camera images may also need further processing to reduce the image noise from long exposures, including subtracting a “dark frame” and a processing called image stacking or "Shift-and-add". There are several commercial, freeware and free software packages available specifically for astronomical photographic image manipulation.

Hardware

Astrophotographic hardware among non-professional astronomers varies widely, since the photographers themselves range from general photographers shooting some form of aesthetically pleasing images to very serious amateur astronomers collecting data for scientific research. As a hobby, astrophotography has many challenges that have to be overcome that differ from conventional photography and from what is normally encountered in professional astronomy.

NGC281, popularly the 'Pacman Nebula', imaged from a suburban location using a 130mm amateur telescope and a DSLR camera.

Since most people live in urban areas, equipment often needs to be portable so that it can be taken far away from the lights of major cities or towns to avoid urban light pollution. Urban astrophotographers may use special light-pollution or narrow-band filters and advanced computer processing techniques to remove ambient urban light from the background of their images. They may also stick to imaging bright targets like the moon and planets. Another method used by amateurs to avoid light pollution is to set up, or rent time, on a remotely operated telescope at a dark sky location. Other challenges include setup and alignment of portable telescopes for accurate tracking, working within the limitations of “off the shelf” equipment, the endurance of monitoring equipment, and sometimes manually tracking astronomical objects over long exposures in a wide range of weather conditions.

Some camera manufacturers modify their products to be used as astrophotography cameras, such as Canon's EOS 60Da, based on the EOS 60D but with a modified infrared filter and a low-noise sensor with heightened hydrogen-alpha sensitivity for improved capture of red hydrogen emission nebulae.

There are also cameras specifically designed for amateur astrophotography based on commercially available imaging sensors. They may also allow the sensor to be cooled to reduce image noise in long exposures, provide raw image readout and to be controlled from a computer for automated imaging. Raw image readout allows later better image processing by retaining all the original image data which along with stacking can assist in imaging faint deep sky objects.

With very low light capability, a few specific models of webcams are popular for Solar, Lunar and Planetary imaging. Mostly, these are manually focused cameras containing a CCD sensor instead of the more common CMOS. The lenses of these cameras are removed and then these are attached to telescopes to record images, video or both. In newer techniques, videos of very faint objects are taken and the sharpest frames of the video are 'stacked' together to obtain a still image of respectable contrast. The Philips PCVC 740K and SPC 900 are among the few webcams liked by astrophotographers.

Equipment setups

An amateur astrophotography setup with an automated guide system connected to a laptop.

Fixed or tripod

The most basic types of astronomical photographs are made with standard cameras and photographic lenses mounted in a fixed position or on a tripod. Foreground objects or landscapes are sometimes composed in the shot. Objects imaged are constellations, interesting planetary configurations, meteors, and bright comets. Exposure times must be short (under a minute) to avoid having the stars point image become an elongated line due to the Earth's rotation. Camera lens focal lengths are usually short, as longer lenses will show image trailing in a matter of seconds. Allowing the stars to intentionally become elongated lines in exposures lasting several minutes or even hours, called “Star trails”, is an artistic technique sometimes used.

Tracking mounts

To achieve longer exposures without objects being blurred, some form of tracking mount is usually employed to compensate for the Earth's rotation, including commercial equatorial mounts and homemade equatorial devices such as barn door trackers and equatorial platforms.

"Piggyback" photography

Piggyback astronomical photography is a method where a camera/lens is mounted on an equatorially mounted astronomical telescope. The telescope is used as a guide scope to keep the field of view centered during the exposure. This allows the camera to use a longer exposure and/or a longer focal length lens or even be attached to some form of photographic telescope co-axial with the main telescope.

Telescope focal plane photography

In this type of photography the telescope itself is used as the "lens" collecting light for the film or CCD of the camera. Although this allows for the magnification and light gathering power of the telescope to be used, it is one of the most difficult astrophotography methods. This is because of the difficulties in centering and focusing sometimes very dim objects in the narrow field of view, contending with magnified vibration and tracking errors, and the added expense of equipment (such as sufficiently sturdy telescope mounts, camera mounts, camera couplers, off axis guiders, guide scopes, illuminated cross-hairs, or auto-guiders mounted on primary telescope or the guide-scope.) There are several different ways cameras (with removable lenses) are attached to amateur astronomical telescopes including:

• Prime focus – In this method the image produced by the telescope falls directly on the film or CCD with no intervening optics or telescope eyepiece.
• Positive projection – A method in which the telescope eyepiece (eyepiece projection) or a positive lens (placed after the focal plane of the telescope objective) is used to project a much more magnified image directly onto the film or CCD. Since the image is magnified with a narrow field of view this method is generally used for lunar and planetary photography.
• Negative projection – This method, like positive projection, produces a magnified image. A negative lens, usually a Barlow or a photographic teleconverter, is placed in the light cone before the focal plane of the telescope objective.
• Compression – Compression uses a positive lens (also called a focal reducer), placed in the converging cone of light before the focal plane of the telescope objective, to reduce overall image magnification. It is used on very long focal length telescopes, such as Maksutovs and Schmidt–Cassegrains, to obtain a wider field of view.

When the camera lens is not removed (or cannot be removed) a common method used is afocal photography, also called afocal projection. In this method both the camera lens and the telescope eyepiece are attached. When both are focused at infinity the light path between them is parallel (afocal), allowing the camera to basically photograph anything the observer can see. This method works well for capturing images of the moon and brighter planets, as well as narrow field images of stars and nebulae. Afocal photography was common with early 20th century consumer level cameras, since many models had non-removable lenses. It has grown in popularity with the introduction of point and shoot digital cameras since most models also have non-removable lenses.

Remote Telescope Astrophotography

With the development of fast Internet in the last part of the 20th century along with advances in computer-controlled telescope mounts and CCD cameras 'Remote Telescope' astronomy is now a viable means for amateur astronomers not aligned with major telescope facilities to partake in research and deep sky imaging. This enables the imager to control a telescope a large distance away in a dark location. The observers can image through the telescopes using CCD cameras. Imaging can be done regardless of the location of the user or the telescopes they wish to use. The digital data collected by the telescope is then transmitted and displayed to the user by means of the Internet. An example of a digital remote telescope operation for public use via the Internet is The Bareket Observatory.

Examples of amateur astrophotography techniques

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  20sec exposure photograph taken with a tripod mounted DSLR camera with 18-55mm lens
  
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  Fixed tripod mounted camera capturing "star trails"
  
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  Star trails photographed in earth orbit from the International Space Station
  
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  Fixed tripod image of a solar eclipse using a digital-SLR camera with a 500 mm lens
  
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  1 minute exposure using ISO 800 film, wide angle lens, piggybacked on an equatorial telescope
  
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  Comet Hale-Bopp, camera with a 300mm lens piggybacked
  
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  Film image of the Andromeda Galaxy shot at the prime focus of an 8" f/4 Schmidt–Newton telescope
  
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  Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae in a montage of two film exposures with an 8" Schmidt–Newton telescope, manually guided
  
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  Image of the moon taken with a Nikon Coolpix P5000 digital camera via Afocal projection through an 8-inch Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope
  
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  The Moon photographed using the Afocal technique, using 10 seconds of video stacked to create a final image.
  
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  A composite of several Digital-SLR photos compiled in Photoshop taken via eyepiece projection from an 8-inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope.
  
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  Saturn image using negative projection (Barlow lens) with a webcam attached to a 250mm Newtonian telescope. It is a composite images made from 10% of the best exposures out of 1200 images using freeware image stacking and sharpening software (Giotto)
  
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  Jupiter photographed using the Afocal technique, using 10 seconds of video stacked to create a final image.
  

Reflecting telescope

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

24 inch convertible Newtonian/Cassegrain reflecting telescope on display at the Franklin Institute

A reflecting telescope (also called a reflector) is a telescope that uses a single or a combination of curved mirrors that reflect light and form an image. The reflecting telescope was invented in the 17th century, by Isaac Newton, as an alternative to the refracting telescope which, at that time, was a design that suffered from severe chromatic aberration. Although reflecting telescopes produce other types of optical aberrations, it is a design that allows for very large diameter objectives. Almost all of the major telescopes used in astronomy research are reflectors. Reflecting telescopes come in many design variations and may employ extra optical elements to improve image quality or place the image in a mechanically advantageous position. Since reflecting telescopes use mirrors, the design is sometimes referred to as a "catoptric" telescope.

History

A replica of Newton's second reflecting telescope that he presented to the Royal Society in 1672

The idea that curved mirrors behave like lenses dates back at least to Alhazen's 11th century treatise on optics, works that had been widely disseminated in Latin translations in early modern Europe. Soon after the invention of the refracting telescope, Galileo, Giovanni Francesco Sagredo, and others, spurred on by their knowledge of the principles of curved mirrors, discussed the idea of building a telescope using a mirror as the image forming objective. There were reports that the Bolognese Cesare Caravaggi had constructed one around 1626 and the Italian professor Niccolò Zucchi, in a later work, wrote that he had experimented with a concave bronze mirror in 1616, but said it did not produce a satisfactory image. The potential advantages of using parabolic mirrors, primarily reduction of spherical aberration with no chromatic aberration, led to many proposed designs for reflecting telescopes. The most notable being James Gregory, who published an innovative design for a ‘reflecting’ telescope in 1663. It would be ten years (1673), before the experimental scientist Robert Hooke was able to build this type of telescope, which became known as the Gregorian telescope.

Isaac Newton has been generally credited with building the first reflecting telescope in 1668. It used a spherically ground metal primary mirror and a small diagonal mirror in an optical configuration that has come to be known as the Newtonian telescope.

Despite the theoretical advantages of the reflector design, the difficulty of construction and the poor performance of the speculum metal mirrors being used at the time meant it took over 100 years for them to become popular. Many of the advances in reflecting telescopes included the perfection of parabolic mirror fabrication in the 18th century, silver coated glass mirrors in the 19th century, long-lasting aluminum coatings in the 20th century, segmented mirrors to allow larger diameters, and active optics to compensate for gravitational deformation. A mid-20th century innovation was catadioptric telescopes such as the Schmidt camera, which use both a spherical mirror and a lens (called a corrector plate) as primary optical elements, mainly used for wide-field imaging without spherical aberration.

The late 20th century has seen the development of adaptive optics and lucky imaging to overcome the problems of seeing, and reflecting telescopes are ubiquitous on space telescopes and many types of spacecraft imaging devices.

Technical considerations

Gran Telescopio Canarias

A curved primary mirror is the reflector telescope's basic optical element that creates an image at the focal plane. The distance from the mirror to the focal plane is called the focal length. Film or a digital sensor may be located here to record the image, or a secondary mirror may be added to modify the optical characteristics and/or redirect the light to film, digital sensors, or an eyepiece for visual observation.

The primary mirror in most modern telescopes is composed of a solid glass cylinder whose front surface has been ground to a spherical or parabolic shape. A thin layer of aluminum is vacuum deposited onto the mirror, forming a highly reflective first surface mirror.

Some telescopes use primary mirrors which are made differently. Molten glass is rotated to make its surface paraboloidal, and is kept rotating while it cools and solidifies. (See Rotating furnace.) The resulting mirror shape approximates a desired paraboloid shape that requires minimal grinding and polishing to reach the exact figure needed.

Optical errors

Reflecting telescopes, just like any other optical system, do not produce "perfect" images. The need to image objects at distances up to infinity, view them at different wavelengths of light, along with the requirement to have some way to view the image the primary mirror produces, means there is always some compromise in a reflecting telescope's optical design.

An image of Sirius A and Sirius B by the Hubble Space Telescope showing diffraction spikes and concentric diffraction rings.

Because the primary mirror focuses light to a common point in front of its own reflecting surface almost all reflecting telescope designs have a secondary mirror, film holder, or detector near that focal point partially obstructing the light from reaching the primary mirror. Not only does this cause some reduction in the amount of light the system collects, it also causes a loss in contrast in the image due to diffraction effects of the obstruction as well as diffraction spikes caused by most secondary support structures.

The use of mirrors avoids chromatic aberration but they produce other types of aberrations. A simple spherical mirror cannot bring light from a distant object to a common focus since the reflection of light rays striking the mirror near its edge do not converge with those that reflect from nearer the center of the mirror, a defect called spherical aberration. To avoid this problem most reflecting telescopes use parabolic shaped mirrors, a shape that can focus all the light to a common focus. Parabolic mirrors work well with objects near the center of the image they produce, (light traveling parallel to the mirror's optical axis), but towards the edge of that same field of view they suffer from off axis aberrations:

• Coma - an aberration where point sources (stars) at the center of the image are focused to a point but typically appears as "comet-like" radial smudges that get worse towards the edges of the image.
• Field curvature - The best image plane is in general curved, which may not correspond to the detector's shape and leads to a focus error across the field. It is sometimes corrected by a field flattening lens.
• Astigmatism - an azimuthal variation of focus around the aperture causing point source images off-axis to appear elliptical. Astigmatism is not usually a problem in a narrow field of view, but in a wide field image it gets rapidly worse and varies quadratically with field angle.
• Distortion - Distortion does not affect image quality (sharpness) but does affect object shapes. It is sometimes corrected by image processing.

There are reflecting telescope designs that use modified mirror surfaces (such as the Ritchey–Chrétien telescope) or some form of correcting lens (such as catadioptric telescopes) that correct some of these aberrations.

Use in astronomical research

Nearly all large research-grade astronomical telescopes are reflectors. There are several reasons for this:

• Reflectors work in a wider spectrum of light since certain wavelengths are absorbed when passing through glass elements like those found in a refractor or in a catadioptric telescope.
• In a lens the entire volume of material has to be free of imperfection and inhomogeneities, whereas in a mirror, only one surface has to be perfectly polished.
• Light of different wavelengths travels through a medium other than vacuum at different speeds. This causes chromatic aberration. Reducing this to acceptable levels usually involves a combination of two or three aperture sized lenses (see achromat and apochromat for more details). The cost of such systems therefore scales significantly with aperture size. An image obtained from a mirror does not suffer from chromatic aberration to begin with, and the cost of the mirror scales much more modestly with its size.
• There are structural problems involved in manufacturing and manipulating large-aperture lenses. Since a lens can only be held in place by its edge, the center of a large lens will sag due to gravity, distorting the image it produces. The largest practical lens size in a refracting telescope is around 1 meter. In contrast, a mirror can be supported by the whole side opposite its reflecting face, allowing for reflecting telescope designs that can overcome gravitational sag. The largest reflector designs currently exceed 10 meters in diameter.

Reflecting telescope designs

Gregorian

Light path in a Gregorian telescope.

The Gregorian telescope, described by Scottish astronomer and mathematician James Gregory in his 1663 book Optica Promota, employs a concave secondary mirror that reflects the image back through a hole in the primary mirror. This produces an upright image, useful for terrestrial observations. Some small spotting scopes are still built this way. There are several large modern telescopes that use a Gregorian configuration such as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, the Magellan telescopes, the Large Binocular Telescope, and the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Newtonian

Light path in a Newtonian telescope.

The Newtonian telescope was the first successful reflecting telescope, completed by Isaac Newton in 1668. It usually has a paraboloid primary mirror but at focal ratios of f/8 or longer a spherical primary mirror can be sufficient for high visual resolution. A flat secondary mirror reflects the light to a focal plane at the side of the top of the telescope tube. It is one of the simplest and least expensive designs for a given size of primary, and is popular with amateur telescope makers as a home-build project.

The Cassegrain design and its variations

Light path in a Cassegrain telescope.

The Cassegrain telescope (sometimes called the "Classic Cassegrain") was first published in a 1672 design attributed to Laurent Cassegrain. It has a parabolic primary mirror, and a hyperbolic secondary mirror that reflects the light back down through a hole in the primary. Folding and diverging effect of the secondary creates a telescope with a long focal length while having a short tube length.

Ritchey–Chrétien

The Ritchey–Chrétien telescope, invented by George Willis Ritchey and Henri Chrétien in the early 1910s, is a specialized Cassegrain reflector which has two hyperbolic mirrors (instead of a parabolic primary). It is free of coma and spherical aberration at a nearly flat focal plane if the primary and secondary curvature are properly figured, making it well suited for wide field and photographic observations. Almost every professional reflector telescope in the world is of the Ritchey–Chrétien design.

Three-mirror anastigmat

Including a third curved mirror allows correction of the remaining distortion, astigmatism, from the Ritchey–Chrétien design. This allows much larger fields of view.

Dall–Kirkham

The Dall–Kirkham Cassegrain telescope's design was created by Horace Dall in 1928 and took on the name in an article published in Scientific American in 1930 following discussion between amateur astronomer Allan Kirkham and Albert G. Ingalls, the magazine editor at the time. It uses a concave elliptical primary mirror and a convex spherical secondary. While this system is easier to grind than a classic Cassegrain or Ritchey–Chrétien system, it does not correct for off-axis coma. Field curvature is actually less than a classical Cassegrain. Because this is less noticeable at longer focal ratios, Dall–Kirkhams are seldom faster than f/15. Takahashi Mewlon telescopes are Dall-Kirkham instruments with f/12 and are highly regarded. They require a corrector for wide field applications.

Off-axis designs

There are several designs that try to avoid obstructing the incoming light by eliminating the secondary or moving any secondary element off the primary mirror's optical axis, commonly called off-axis optical systems.

Herschelian

Light paths

Herschelian telescope

 

Schiefspiegler telescope

The Herschelian reflector is named after William Herschel, who used this design to build very large telescopes including a 49.5 inch (126 cm) diameter telescope in 1789. In the Herschelian reflector the primary mirror is tilted so the observer's head does not block the incoming light. Although this introduces geometrical aberrations, Herschel employed this design to avoid the use of a Newtonian secondary mirror since the speculum metal mirrors of that time tarnished quickly and could only achieve 60% reflectivity.

Schiefspiegler

A variant of the Cassegrain, the Schiefspiegler telescope ("skewed" or "oblique reflector") uses tilted mirrors to avoid the secondary mirror casting a shadow on the primary. However, while eliminating diffraction patterns this leads to an increase in coma and astigmatism. These defects become manageable at large focal ratios — most Schiefspieglers use f/15 or longer, which tends to restrict useful observation to the moon and planets. A number of variations are common, with varying numbers of mirrors of different types. The Kutter (named after its inventor Anton Kutter) style uses a single concave primary, a convex secondary and a plano-convex lens between the secondary mirror and the focal plane, when needed (this is the case of the catadioptric Schiefspiegler). One variation of a multi-schiefspiegler uses a concave primary, convex secondary and a parabolic tertiary. One of the interesting aspects of some Schiefspieglers is that one of the mirrors can be involved in the light path twice — each light path reflects along a different meridional path.

Stevick-Paul

Stevick-Paul telescopes are off-axis versions of Paul 3-mirror systems with an added flat diagonal mirror. A convex secondary mirror is placed just to the side of the light entering the telescope, and positioned afocally so as to send parallel light on to the tertiary. The concave tertiary mirror is positioned exactly twice as far to the side of the entering beam as was the convex secondary, and its own radius of curvature distant from the secondary. Because the tertiary mirror receives parallel light from the secondary, it forms an image at its focus. The focal plane lies within the system of mirrors, but is accessible to the eye with the inclusion of a flat diagonal. The Stevick-Paul configuration results in all optical aberrations totaling zero to the third-order, except for the Petzval surface which is gently curved.

Yolo

The Yolo was developed by Arthur S. Leonard in the mid-1960s. Like the Schiefspiegler, it is an unobstructed, tilted reflector telescope. The original Yolo consists of a primary and secondary concave mirror, with the same curvature, and the same tilt to the main axis. Most Yolos use toroidal reflectors. The Yolo design eliminates coma, but leaves significant astigmatism, which is reduced by deformation of the secondary mirror by some form of warping harness, or alternatively, polishing a toroidal figure into the secondary. Like Schiefspieglers, many Yolo variations have been pursued. The needed amount of toroidal shape can be transferred entirely or partially to the primary mirror. In large focal ratios optical assemblies, both primary and secondary mirror can be left spherical and a spectacle correcting lens is added between the secondary mirror and the focal plane (catadioptric Yolo). The addition of a convex, long focus tertiary mirror leads to Leonard's Solano configuration. The Solano telescope doesn't contain any toric surfaces.

Liquid mirror telescopes

One design of telescope uses a rotating mirror consisting of a liquid metal in a tray which is spun at constant speed. As the tray spins the liquid forms a paraboloidal surface of essentially unlimited size. This allows for very big telescope mirrors (over 6 metres), but unfortunately they cannot be steered, as they always point vertically.

Focal planes

Prime focus

A prime focus telescope design. The observer/camera is at the focal point (shown as a red X).

In a prime focus design no secondary optics are used, the image is accessed at the focal point of the primary mirror. At the focal point is some type of structure for holding a film plate or electronic detector. In the past, in very large telescopes, an observer would sit inside the telescope in an "observing cage" to directly view the image or operate a camera. Nowadays CCD cameras allow for remote operation of the telescope from almost anywhere in the world. The space available at prime focus is severely limited by the need to avoid obstructing the incoming light.

Radio telescopes often have a prime focus design. The mirror is replaced by a metal surface for reflecting radio waves, and the observer is an antenna.

Cassegrain focus

Cassegrain design

For telescopes built to the Cassegrain design or other related designs, the image is formed behind the primary mirror, at the focal point of the secondary mirror. An observer views through the rear of the telescope, or a camera or other instrument is mounted on the rear. Cassegrain focus is commonly used for amateur telescopes or smaller research telescopes. However, for large telescopes with correspondingly large instruments, an instrument at Cassegrain focus must move with the telescope as it slews; this places additional requirements on the strength of the instrument support structure, and potentially limits the movement of the telescope in order to avoid collision with obstacles such as walls or equipment inside the observatory.

Nasmyth and coudé focus

Nasmyth/coudé light path.

Nasmyth

The Nasmyth design is similar to the Cassegrain except the light is not directed through a hole in the primary mirror; instead, a third mirror reflects the light to the side of the telescope to allow for the mounting of heavy instruments. This is a very common design in large research telescopes.

Coudé

Adding further optics to a Nasmyth-style telescope to deliver the light (usually through the declination axis) to a fixed focus point that does not move as the telescope is reoriented gives a coudé focus (from the French word for elbow). The coudé focus gives a narrower field of view than a Nasmyth focus and is used with very heavy instruments that do not need a wide field of view. One such application is high-resolution spectrographs that have large collimating mirrors (ideally with the same diameter as the telescope's primary mirror) and very long focal lengths. Such instruments could not withstand being moved, and adding mirrors to the light path to form a coudé train, diverting the light to a fixed position to such an instrument housed on or below the observing floor (and usually built as an unmoving integral part of the observatory building) was the only option. The 60-inch Hale telescope (1.5 m), Hooker Telescope, 200-inch Hale Telescope, Shane Telescope, and Harlan J. Smith Telescope all were built with coudé foci instrumentation. The development of echelle spectrometers allowed high-resolution spectroscopy with a much more compact instrument, one which can sometimes be successfully mounted on the Cassegrain focus. Since inexpensive and adequately stable computer-controlled alt-az telescope mounts were developed in the 1980s, the Nasmyth design has generally supplanted the coudé focus for large telescopes.

Fibre-fed spectrographs

For instruments requiring very high stability, or that are very large and cumbersome, it is desirable to mount the instrument on a rigid structure, rather than moving it with the telescope. Whilst transmission of the full field of view would require a standard coudé focus, spectroscopy typically involves the measurement of only a few discrete objects, such as stars or galaxies. It is therefore feasible to collect light from these objects with optical fibers at the telescope, placing the instrument at an arbitrary distance from the telescope. Examples of fiber-fed spectrographs include the planet-hunting spectrographs HARPS or ESPRESSO.

Additionally, the flexibility of optical fibers allow light to be collected from any focal plane; for example, the HARPS spectrograph utilises the Cassegrain focus of the ESO 3.6 m Telescope, whilst the Prime Focus Spectrograph is connected to the prime focus of the Subaru telescope.