The next time you look up at a rainbow in the sky, you can thank Newton for helping us first understand and identify its seven colors. Newton helped develop spectral analysisĪ drawing of Sir Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism. Newton’s simple telescope design is still used today, by both backyard astronomers and NASA scientists. In fact, his first model, which he built in 1668 and donated to England’s Royal Society, was just six inches long (some 10 times smaller than other telescopes of the era), but could magnify objects by 40x. Newton’s new “reflecting telescope” was more powerful than previous versions, and because he used the small mirror to bounce the image to the eye, he could build a much smaller, more practical telescope. He replaced the refracting lenses with mirrored ones, including a large, concave mirror to show the primary image and a smaller, flat, reflecting one, to display that image to the eye. This caused “chromatic aberrations,” or fuzzy, out-of-focus areas around objects being viewed through the telescope.Īfter much tinkering and testing, including grinding his own lenses, Newton found a solution. Known as refracting telescopes, they used glass lenses that changed the direction of different colors at different angles. Photo: Getty Imagesīefore Newton, standard telescopes provided magnification, but with drawbacks.
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