SCIENCE HOBBYIST: make a simple telescope

MY SIMPLE EXPLANATION:

If you put a lens right on your eye, it makes things blurry, but it
does not magnify distant scenes. This is how eyeglasses work. They
change the blurry-ness or sharpness of what you see, but they don’t
act as magnifiers when used normally.

Now if you move a lens away from your eye, and keep looking through
it, everything WILL change size. If the lens is concave (thinner in
the center,) everything you see in the lens will get smaller and
smaller as you move the lens farther away from your eye. If you use a
convex lens instead, everything will get bigger and bigger as you
move it away.

The convex lens is the interesting one because it makes things
bigger when you move it farther from your eye. Keep moving it
farther and farther away. You’ll find that everything will
become VERY big, even infinitely big. And infinitely blurry too.
Move the lens a little farther, and things get small again, but now
everything seen through the lens is upside-down.

By moving the convex lens in and out, we can change the size of
everything, or make it all go upside-down or rightside-up.
Unfortunately everything is very blurry when you’re looking through
the lens. If only there was some way to remove the blurryness, we
could hold a convex lens in front of our eye and use it to magnify
distant scenes.

There is a way to remove the blur: wear glasses! Glasses are used to
correct blurry vision, and they can fix this blur too. Put another
lens right upon your eye. It acts like eyeglasses and makes the image
sharp. If you do this, you have constructed a telescope. The
objective lens creates a magnified view of distant objects, while the
eyepiece lens removes the blur. That’s how telescopes work.

MAKE A TELESCOPE USING JUST ONE LENS

Here’s an interesting question. If human beings could focus their
eyes better, could we build telescopes with only one lens? Suppose
you were able to focus your eyes on an object that was 1/10 inch away
from your eye. Couldn’t you hold an “objective” lens a few inches
away, look through it, then focus really hard with your eyes and
create a telescope? The answer is yes!

Even if you don’t have a superhuman ability to overfocus your eyes,
you can still make a simple one-lens telescope. Here’s how. Hold a
weak convex lens in front of your eye. Close your other eye. Move
the lens far away so that everything turns upside-down. Move the
lens a bit closer so that everything stays upside-down, but gets
bigger and blurry. Now focus your eyes really hard by crossing them.
(This might take a bit of practice! Crossing your eyes while one eye
is closed is not that easy to do.)

The image you see in the lens will become sharper. If it doesn’t
become completely sharp, then move the lens farther away. Also try
moving the lens closer while focusing really, REALLY hard. Everything
you see in the lens will be clear, sharp, and magnified!
You have made a telescope with nothing but a single lens! Tell your
friends about it and they won’t believe you. Then show them the
trick and they’ll be amazed.

MAKE A TELESCOPE WITH A LENS AND SOME FOIL

It is also possible to make a telescope using aluminum foil and one
lens. The lens will act as the telescope’s objective lens. To make
an eyepiece, we just poke a tiny hole in the foil, and use this
pinhole as the telescope eyepiece lens. The tiny hole in the foil
removes the blur. But it also makes the image very dim. That’s
alright, just use this telescope to watch a bright outdoor scene.

To make a good pinhole, stack up several layers of aluminum foil, poke
the stack with a pin, then separate the layers and choose whichever
one has a very round, very small hole. Experiment with different
holes; put one on your eye, look through it a brightly-lit scene,
and see how sharp
everything looks. Smaller holes generally give sharper, dimmer images,
but VERY small holes cause blur because of “optical diffraction”
effects. You want your pinhole to be very small, but not so small
that things become blurry.

To make a telescope, hold the best pinhole against your eye and look
through it. Look at a brightly lit scene, such as the sunny outdoors
outside a classroom window. Now place your objective lens against the
pinhole, then move it slowly outwards. When you see a magnified
scene, your telescope is working! You can hold your lens in different
spots so the scene is either upside down or right side up.

An aluminum foil pinhole can be made sturdier by using rubber cement
to glue it to a piece of cardboard which has a 1cm hole punched in the
center (don’t get cement in the tiny pinhole though!)

You can use your pinhole-telescope to create a “zoom lens” effect by
moving the objective lens towards the pinhole or away. And depending
on the distance between the pinhole and the lens, the scene you see
can either be upside-down or right-side-up. It’s very complicated to
build a zoom-lens telescope with real eyepiece lenses, but if you use
a pinhole it becomes simple.