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Why do microscopes get high resolution with small lenses and telescopes don't?
The angular resolution of a telescope depends on the width of its objective lense or main mirror. if you want to see more detail you need a bigger lens/mirror, no two ways about it.
So why do microscopes have such tiny objective lenses?
2 Answers
- Steve BLv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
Go back to basic optics ..
Light 'rays' from the stars are essentially 'parallel' .... you want to collect many of them (wide aperture) and focus them to a spot (small eyepiece lens) ... you can't get 'more light' to reflect off a Star, only collect more of the light the star is outputting :-)
Light 'rays' coming from a small object 10mm in front of your nose will never be 'parallel' .. in fact they will be 'divergent' ... so your problem is getting them to focus .. this means a VERY HIGH POWER lens very close to the object = and since you can get (almost) as much light reflecting off the object as your like the 'objective' diameter is almost irrelevant...
- Gary HLv 78 years ago
It is all about focal distance. The working distance for a microscope at 1000X is tenths of mm. The working distance for telescopes is a few orders of magnitude larger (like 10^20).
