Current Telescopes Developments

After the invention of telescope, there have been a number of developments made in the domain of telescopes every year. With the advancement in technology, telescopes are getting better and better every year.

For instance, one important development was the use of camera attached to the telescope in order to capture the image made by a telescope. The size and the power of the telescope are getting better and better every day.

One of the biggest optical telescopes today

There are many examples of latest developments in telescopes. For example, a new development in telescope is related with the optical resolution of the telescope. Optical resolution defines the fineness of the detail being taken by the telescope. It is achieved by increasing the size of the lens used in the telescope.

The bigger the lens, the more fine detail it will capture. However, it must be noted that the starlight which penetrates the surface of the earth gets blurred because of the turbulent atmosphere of the earth.

This is one of the limitations on the resolution. The twinkling effect that these stars produce at night is because of this limitation.

However, with the advancement in technology, astrologers have found a solution of this problem. Today, with the help of computers, astronomers are involved in developing such adaptive optics that is capable of removing this blur from the light coming from stars.

Keck II

One famous telescope is located in Hawaii’s Mauna Kea observatory. Its name is Keck II and it is based on a new technology that was introduced in 1999.

This technology enables the telescope to take different images or pictures that are almost 20 times finer than the pictures that were produced by previous telescopes. As mentioned earlier, telescopes that use adaptive optics are capable of removing blurs to produce a finer image of a celestial object.

Another exciting recent development in the domain of telescope is called as optical interferometry. This new technology was introduced for optical astronomy.

The idea behind this technology is to enable the combination of signals coming from different telescopes, which might be located at different locations, in order to form a resulting image that would be the equal to the image that has been taken by a really giant telescope.

This method is called as optical interferometry; combining the signals or images received from various telescope to present a resulting image that would be the same as if it was taken from a giant telescope.

VLT by ESO

Few years back in 2001 at the Atacama Desert in Chile, the ESO (European Southern Observatory) introduced the largest optical interferometer also called as the VLT (Very Large Telescope).

As mentioned earlier that the telescope that uses optical interferometer technology uses signals from one than one telescope, the VLT comes the light or the image from four different telescopes (each one of them is 323 inches) and several other relatively smaller telescopes in order to produce a resulting image that is equal to the size of the image produced by a 630in telescope.

One of the main purposes behind using a telescope, based on the optical interferometer technology, is to draw a line between closely coupled bright objects like double stars etc.

The developments in the telescopes are continuing to expand and it will continue to grow more in future as the astrologers wants to reveal more and more information about the objects in the night sky.

All these developments have helped the humanity to understand this universe much better then humanity has ever known before. These developments have also answered some critical questions related with the formation of planets etc.

These advancements will continue and developments will be made in order to view more exciting celestial objects. Most of us are anxiously waiting for future developments and soon we shall be able to see those things that humanity has never seen before.