For hundreds of years, the principle behind the telescope has been as simple as it gets: build a lens or mirror to collect a large amount of light, focus that light onto a detector (like an eye, a ...

Optical telescopes utilize refraction and reflection to focus light, enabling detailed astronomical observations and ...

Researchers have designed a new kind of telescope that is a cheaper, lighter and more powerful option than creating telescopes using ever-larger mirrors. With a fleet of the new space telescopes, they ...

A new way of bending X-rays raises the prospect of smaller, more powerful X-ray space telescopes. Based on technology originally developed for medical imaging machines, Stacked Prism Lens are being ...

When you look at the night sky, do you ever wonder what's going on out there? On a clear night with a dark sky, if moonlight doesn't wash it out, sometimes you can see the arc of the Milky Way. The ...

For centuries, telescopes have relied on curved lenses and mirrors to observe the Universe. A team of researchers has ...

Our proposed telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory, would replace large, heavy mirrors with a novel, thin lens that is much lighter, cheaper and easier to produce than mirrored telescopes. Because ...

Aug 31, 2008 After two months of calibration and testing, NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope has started to deliver the goods, providing scientists with an all-sky image of the Milky Way.

For centuries, lenses have worked the same way: curved glass or plastic bending light to bring images into focus. But traditional lenses have a major drawback—the more powerful they need to be, the ...

Victor Rogus contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. One of my greatest joys in amateur astronomy has been in building my own equipment. The great Clyde Tombaugh ...