 A refracting telescope (also called a refractor) is

a type of optical telescope that uses a lens as

its objective to form an image (also referred to
a dioptric telescope). The refracting telescope
design was originally used in spy glasses
and astronomical telescopes but is also used
for long focus camera lenses. Although large
refracting telescopes were very popular in the
second half of the 19th century, for most research
purposes the refracting telescope has been
superseded by the reflecting telescope which allows
larger apertures. A refractor's magnification is
calculated by dividing the focal length of the
objective lens by that of the eyepiece.
 OBJECTIVE LENSE– A very large lens that collects a
large amount of light from a faraway object. It also
has a long focal length. This forms the object’s first
real, inverted and diminished image.
 EYEPIECE LENSE- it has a short focal length. It
acts like a magnifying lens for the image cast by
the objective lens. is closer to the eye. It forms
the final virtual, enlarged image of the object.
 The first record of a telescope comes from the Netherlands in
1608. It is in a patent filed by Middelburg spectacle-
maker Hans Lippersheywith the States General of the
Netherlands on 2 October 1608 for his instrument "for seeing
things far away as if they were nearby". A few weeks later
another Dutch instrument-maker, Jacob Metius also applied for
a patent. The States General did not award a patent since the
knowledge of the device already seemed to be ubiquitous but
the Dutch government awarded Lippershey with a contract for
copies of his design.
 The original Dutch telescopes were composed of a convex and
a concave lens—telescopes that are constructed this way do
not invert the image. Lippershey's original design had only
3x magnification. Telescopes seem to have been made in the
Netherlands in considerable numbers soon after this date of
"invention", and rapidly found their way all over Europe.
 The design Galileo Galilei used in 1609 is commonly called
a Galilean telescope. It used a convergent (plano-convex)
objective lens and a divergent (plano-concave) eyepiece lens
(Galileo, 1610).A Galilean telescope, because the design has
no intermediary focus, results in a non-inverted and upright
image.
 Galileo’s best telescope magnified objects about 30 times.
Because of flaws in its design, such as the shape of the lens
and the narrow field of view, the images were blurry and
distorted. Despite these flaws, the telescope was still good
enough for Galileo to explore the sky. The Galilean telescope
could view the phases of Venus, and was able to
see craters on the Moon and four moons orbiting Jupiter.
 Parallel rays of light from a distant object (y)
would be brought to a focus in the focal plane
of the objective lens (F′ L1 / y′). The (diverging)
eyepiece (L2) lens intercepts these rays and
renders them parallel once more. Non-parallel
rays of light from the object traveling at an
angle α1 to the optical axis travel at a larger
angle (α2 > α1) after they passed through the
eyepiece. This leads to an increase in the
apparent angular size and is responsible for the
perceived magnification.
 The final image (y″) is a virtual image, located
at infinity and is the same way up as the object.
Optical diagram of Galilean telescope y – Distant
object ; y′ – Real image from objective ; y″ – Magnified
virtual image from eyepiece ; D – Entrance pupil
diameter ; d – Virtual exit pupil diameter ; L1 –
Objective lens ; L2 – Eyepiece lens e – Virtual exit pupil
– Telescope equals
 The Keplerian telescope, invented by Johannes Kepler in
1611, is an improvement on Galileo's design. It uses a
convex lens as the eyepiece instead of Galileo's concave
one. The advantage of this arrangement is that the rays of
light emerging from the eyepiece are converging. This
allows for a much wider field of view and greater eye relief,
but the image for the viewer is inverted. Considerably
higher magnifications can be reached with this design, but
to overcome aberrations the simple objective lens needs to
have a very high f-ratio (Johannes Hevelius built one with a
46-metre (150 ft) focal length, and even longer tubeless
"aerial telescopes" were constructed). The design also
allows for use of a micrometer at the focal plane (used to
determine the angular size and/or distance between objects
observed).
 The achromatic refracting lens was invented in 1733 by
an English barrister named Chester Moore Hall, although
it was independently invented and patented by John
Dollond around 1758. The design overcame the need for
very long focal lengths in refracting telescopes by using
an objective made of two pieces of glass with
different dispersion, 'crown' and 'flint glass', to limit the
effects of chromatic and spherical aberration. Each side
of each piece is ground and polished, and then the two
pieces are assembled together. Achromatic lenses are
corrected to bring two wavelengths (typically red and
blue) into focus in the same plane. The era of the 'great
refractors' in the 19th century saw large achromatic
lenses culminating with largest achromatic refractor
ever built, the Great Paris Exhibition Telescope of 1900.
 Apochromatic refractors have objectives built
with special, extra-low dispersion materials. They
are designed to bring three wavelengths (typically
red, green, and blue) into focus in the same
plane. The residual color error (tertiary spectrum)
can be up to an order of magnitude less than that
of an achromatic lens. Such telescopes contain
elements of fluorite or special, extra-low
dispersion (ED) glass in the objective and produce
a very crisp image that is virtually free of
chromatic aberration. Due to the special materials
needed in the fabrication, apochromatic refractors
are usually more expensive than telescopes of
other types with a comparable aperture.
 A reflecting telescope (also called a reflector) is
a telescope that uses a single or combination of curved
mirrors that reflect light and form an image. The
reflecting telescope was invented in the 17th century as an
alternative to the refracting telescope which, at that time,
was a design that suffered from severe chromatic
aberration. Although reflecting telescopes produce other
types of optical aberrations, it is a design that allows for
very large diameter objectives. Almost all of the major
telescopes used in astronomy research are reflectors.
Reflecting telescopes come in many design variations and
may employ extra optical elements to improve image
quality or place the image in a mechanically advantageous
position. Since reflecting telescopes use mirrors, the
design is sometimes referred to as a "catoptric" telescope.
 The idea that curved mirrors behave like lenses dates back at least
to Alhazen's 11th century treatise on optics, works that had been widely
disseminated in Latin translations in early modern Europe.Soon after the
invention of the refracting telescope , Galileo, Giovanni Francesco
Sagredo, and others, spurred on by their knowledge of the principles of
curved mirrors, discussed the idea of building a telescope using a mirror
as the image forming objective.There were reports that
the Bolognese Cesare Caravaggi had constructed one around 1626 and the
Italian professor Niccolò Zucchi, in a later work, wrote that he had
experimented with a concave bronze mirror in 1616, but said it did not
produce a satisfactory image.The potential advantages of using parabolic
mirrors, primarily reduction of spherical aberration with no chromatic
aberration, led to many proposed designs for reflecting telescopes.The
most notable being James Gregory, who published an innovative design
for a ‘reflecting’ telescope in 1663. It would be ten years (1673), before
the experimental scientist Robert Hooke was able to build this type of
telescope, which became known as the Gregorian telescope.
 Isaac Newton has been generally credited with building the first
reflecting telescope in 1668. It used a spherically ground
metal primary mirror and a small diagonal mirror in an optical
configuration that has come to be known as the Newtonian
telescope.
 Despite the theoretical advantages of the reflector design, the
difficulty of construction and the poor performance of the speculum
metal mirrors being used at the time meant it took over 100 years
for them to become popular. Many of the advances in reflecting
telescopes included the perfection of parabolic mirror fabrication in
the 18th century,silver coated glass mirrors in the 19th century, long-
lasting aluminum coatings in the 20th century,segmented mirrors to
allow larger diameters, and active optics to compensate for
gravitational deformation. A mid-20th century innovation
was catadioptric telescopes such as the Schmidt camera, which use
both a spherical mirror and a lens (called a corrector plate) as
primary optical elements, mainly used for wide-field imaging without
spherical aberration.
 The late 20th century has seen the development of adaptive
optics and lucky imaging to overcome the problems of seeing, and
reflecting telescopes are ubiquitous on space telescopes and many
types of spacecraft imaging devices.
 Reflecting telescopes, just like any other optical system, do not
produce "perfect" images. The need to image objects at distances up
to infinity, view them at different wavelengths of light, along with
the requirement to have some way to view the image the primary
mirror produces, means there is always some compromise in a
reflecting telescope's optical design.
 An image of Sirius A and Sirius B by the Hubble Space Telescope
showing diffraction spikes and concentric diffraction rings.
 Because the primary mirror focuses light to a common point in front
of its own reflecting surface almost all reflecting telescope designs
have a secondary mirror, film holder, or detector near that focal point
partially obstructing the light from reaching the primary mirror. Not
only does this cause some reduction in the amount of light the system
collects, it also causes a loss in contrast in the image due
to diffraction effects of the obstruction as well as diffraction spikes
caused by most secondary support structures.
 The use of mirrors avoids chromatic aberration but
they produce other types of aberrations. A
simple spherical mirror cannot bring light from a
distant object to a common focus since the
reflection of light rays striking the mirror near its
edge do not converge with those that reflect from
nearer the center of the mirror, a defect
called spherical aberration. To avoid this problem
most reflecting telescopes use parabolic shaped
mirrors, a shape that can focus all the light to a
common focus. Parabolic mirrors work well with
objects near the center of the image they produce,
(light traveling parallel to the mirror's optical axis),
but towards the edge of that same field of view
they suffer from off axis aberrations:
 Coma - an aberration where point sources (stars) at the center of the
image are focused to a point but typically appears as "comet-like"
radial smudges that get worse towards the edges of the image.
 Field curvature - The best image plane is in general curved, which
may not correspond to the detector's shape and leads to a focus error
across the field. It is sometimes corrected by a field flattening lens.
 Astigmatism - an azimuthal variation of focus around the aperture
causing point source images off-axis to appear elliptical. Astigmatism
is not usually a problem in a narrow field of view, but in a wide field
image it gets rapidly worse and varies quadratically with field angle.
 Distortion- Distortion does not affect image quality (sharpness) but
does affect object shapes. It is sometimes corrected by image
processing.
 There are reflecting telescope designs that use modified mirror
surfaces (such as the Ritchey–Chrétien telescope) or some form of
correcting lens (such as catadioptric telescopes) that correct some of
these aberrations.
 Reflectors work in a wider spectrum of light since
certain wavelengths are absorbed when passing
through glass elements like those found in
a refractor or in a catadioptric telescope.
 There are structural problems involved in
manufacturing and manipulating large-aperture
lenses. Since a lens can only be held in place by its
edge, the center of a large lens will sag due
to gravity, distorting the image it produces. The
largest practical lens size in a refracting telescope
is around 1 meter.In contrast, a mirror can be
supported by the whole side opposite its reflecting
face, allowing for reflecting telescope designs that
can overcome gravitational sag. The largest
reflector designs currently exceed 10 meters in
diameter.
 In a lens the entire volume of material has to be
free of imperfection and inhomogeneities,
whereas in a mirror, only one surface has to be
perfectly polished.
 Light of different wavelengths travels through a
medium other than vacuum at different speeds.
This causes chromatic aberration. Reducing this
to acceptable levels usually involves a
combination of two or three aperture sized
lenses (see chromate and apochromat for more
details). The cost of such systems therefore
scales significantly with aperture size. An image
obtained from a mirror does not suffer from
chromatic aberration to begin with, and the cost
of the mirror scales much more modestly with its
size.
 An image of Sirius A and Sirius B by the Hubble Space
Telescope showing diffraction spikes and concentric diffraction
rings.
 The Gregorian telescope, described
by Scottish astronomer and mathematician James
Gregory in his 1663 book Optica Promota, employs a
concave secondary mirror that reflects the image
back through a hole in the primary mirror. This
produces an upright image, useful for terrestrial
observations. Some small spotting scopes are still
built this way. There are several large modern
telescopes that use a Gregorian configuration such
as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope,
the Magellan telescopes, the Large Binocular
Telescope, and the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Light path in a Gregorian telescope
 The Newtonian telescope was the first
successful reflecting telescope, completed
by Isaac Newton in 1668. It usually has a
paraboloid primary mirror but at focal ratios of
f/8 or longer a spherical primary mirror can be
sufficient for high visual resolution. A flat
secondary mirror reflects the light to a focal
plane at the side of the top of the telescope
tube. It is one of the simplest and least
expensive designs for a given size of primary,
and is popular with amateur telescope makers
as a home-build project.
Light path in a Newtonian telescope
 The Cassegrain telescope (sometimes
called the "Classic Cassegrain") was first
published in an 1672 design attributed
to Laurent Cassegrain. It has a parabolic
primary mirror, and a hyperbolic
secondary mirror that reflects the light
back down through a hole in the primary.
Folding and diverging effect of the
secondary creates a telescope with a long
focal length while having a short tube
length.
Light path in a Cassegrain telescope.
 - The Ritchey–
Chrétien telescope, invented by George Willis
Ritchey and Henri Chrétien in the early 1910s, is a
specialized Cassegrain reflector which has two
hyperbolic mirrors (instead of a parabolic
primary). It is free of coma and spherical
aberration at a nearly flat focal plane if the
primary and secondary curvature are
properly figured, making it well suited for wide
field and photographic observations. Almost every
professional reflector telescope in the world is of
the Ritchey–Chrétien design.
- Including a third
curved mirror allows correction of the remaining
distortion, astigmatism, from the Ritchey–
Chrétien design. This allows much larger fields of
view.
 - The Dall–Kirkham Cassegrain
telescope's design was created by Horace Dall in
1928 and took on the name in an article published
in Scientific American in 1930 following discussion
between amateur astronomer Allan Kirkham and
Albert G. Ingalls, the magazine editor at the time.
It uses a concave elliptical primary mirror and a
convex spherical secondary. While this system is
easier to grind than a classic Cassegrain or
Ritchey–Chrétien system, it does not correct for
off-axis coma. Field curvature is actually less than
a classical Cassegrain. Because this is less
noticeable at longer focal ratios, Dall–Kirkham are
seldom faster than f/15. Takahashi Mewlon
telescopes are Dall-Kirkham instruments with f/12
and are highly regarded. They require a corrector
for wide field applications.
 There are several designs that try to avoid
obstructing the incoming light by eliminating
the secondary or moving any secondary element
off the primary mirror's optical axis, commonly
called off-axis optical systems.
The Herschelian reflector is named after William
Herschel, who used this design to build very large
telescopes including a 49.5 inch (126 cm) diameter
telescope in 1789. In the Herschelian reflector the
primary mirror is tilted so the observer's head does
not block the incoming light. Although this
introduces geometrical aberrations, Herschel
employed this design to avoid the use of a
Newtonian secondary mirror since the speculum
metal mirrors of that time tarnished quickly and
could only achieve 60% reflectivity.
 A variant of the Cassegrain, the Schiefspiegler telescope
("skewed" or "oblique reflector") uses tilted mirrors to avoid
the secondary mirror casting a shadow on the primary.
However, while eliminating diffraction patterns this leads to an
increase in coma and astigmatism. These defects become
manageable at large focal ratios — most Schiefspieglers use
f/15 or longer, which tends to restrict useful observation to
the moon and planets. A number of variations are common,
with varying numbers of mirrors of different types. The Kutter
(named after its inventor Anton Kutter) style uses a single
concave primary, a convex secondary and a plano-convex lens
between the secondary mirror and the focal plane, when
needed (this is the case of the catadioptric Schiefspiegler).
One variation of a multi-schiefspiegler uses a concave
primary, convex secondary and a parabolic tertiary. One of the
interesting aspects of some Schiefspieglers is that one of the
mirrors can be involved in the light path twice — each light
path reflects along a different meridional path.
Herschelian telescope

Schiefspiegler telescope
 Stevick-Paul telescopes are off-axis versions of Paul 3-
mirror systems with an added flat diagonal mirror. A
convex secondary mirror is placed just to the side of the
light entering the telescope, and positioned afocally so
as to send parallel light on to the tertiary. The concave
tertiary mirror is positioned exactly twice as far to the
side of the entering beam as was the convex secondary,
and its own radius of curvature distant from the
secondary. Because the tertiary mirror receives parallel
light from the secondary, it forms an image at its focus.
The focal plane lies within the system of mirrors, but is
accessible to the eye with the inclusion of a flat
diagonal. The Stevick-Paul configuration results in all
optical aberrations totaling zero to the third-order,
except for the Petzval surface which is gently curved.
 The Yolo was developed by Arthur S. Leonard in the mid-
1960s.Like the Schiefspiegler, it is an unobstructed, tilted
reflector telescope. The original Yolo consists of a primary and
secondary concave mirror, with the same curvature, and the
same tilt to the main axis. Most Yolos use toroidal reflectors.
The Yolo design eliminates coma, but leaves significant
astigmatism, which is reduced by deformation of the
secondary mirror by some form of warping harness, or
alternatively, polishing a toroidal figure into the secondary.
Like Schiefspieglers, many Yolo variations have been pursued.
The needed amount of toroidal shape can be transferred
entirely or partially to the primary mirror. In large focal ratios
optical assemblies, both primary and secondary mirror can be
left spherical and a spectacle correcting lens is added between
the secondary mirror and the focal plane (catadioptric Yolo).
The addition of a convex, long focus tertiary mirror leads to
Leonard's Solano configuration. The Solano telescope doesn't
contain any toric surfaces
 Catadioptric telescopes are optical
telescopes that combine specifically shaped
mirrors and lenses to form an image. This is
usually done so that the telescope can have an
overall greater degree of error correction than
their all-lens or all-mirror counterparts, with a
consequently wider aberration-free field of view.
Their designs can have simple all-spherical
surfaces and can take advantage of a folded
optical path that reduces the mass of the
telescope, making them easier to manufacture.
Many types employ “correctors”, a lens or
curved mirror in a combined image-forming
optical system so that the reflective or
refractive element can correct the aberrations
produced by its counterpart.
 Catadioptric dialytes are the earliest type of
catadioptric telescope. They consist of a
single-element refractor objective combined
with a silver-backed negative lens (similar to
a Mangin mirror). The first of these was the
Hamiltonian telescope patented by W. F.
Hamilton in 1814. The Schupmann medial
telescope designed by German
optician Ludwig Schupmann near the end of
the 19th century placed the catadioptric
mirror beyond the focus of the refractor
primary and added a third
correcting/focusing lens to the system.
 There are several telescope designs that take
advantage of placing one or more full-diameter
lenses (commonly called a "corrector plate") in front
of a spherical primary mirror. These designs take
advantage of all the surfaces being "spherically
symmetrical” and were originally invented to create
optical systems with very fast focal ratios (wide fields
of view) with little coma or astigmatism for use
as astrographic cameras. They work by combining a
spherical mirror's ability to reflect light back to the
same point with a large lens at the front of the
system (a corrector) that slightly bends the incoming
light, allowing the spherical mirror to image objects
at infinity. Some of these designs have been adapted
to create compact, long-focal-length
catadioptric cassegrains.
 - The Schmidt corrector,
the first full-diameter corrector plate, was used
in Bernhard Schmidt's 1931 Schmidt camera. The
Schmidt camera is a wide-field photographic telescope,
with the corrector plate at the center of curvature of
the primary mirror, producing an image at a focus inside
the tube assembly where a curved film plate or detector
is mounted. The relatively thin and lightweight
corrector allows Schmidt cameras to be constructed in
diameters up to 1.3 m. The corrector's complex shape
takes several processes to make, starting with a flat
piece of optical glass, placing a vacuum on one side of it
to curve the whole piece, then grinding and polishing
the other side flat to achieve the exact shape required
to correct the spherical aberration caused by the
primary mirror. The design has lent itself to
many Schmidt variants.
Light path in a Schmidt–Cassegrain

Light path in a meniscus

telescope
 -The idea of replacing
the complicated Schmidt corrector plate with an easy-
to-manufacture full-aperture spherical meniscus lens
(a meniscus corrector shell) to create a wide-field
telescope occurred to at least four optical designers in
early 1940s war-torn Europe, including Albert
Bouwers (1940), Dmitri Dmitrievich Maksutov (1941), K.
Penning, and Dennis Gabor (1941). Wartime secrecy kept
these inventors from knowing about each other's designs,
leading to each being an independent invention. Albert
Bouwers built a prototype meniscus telescope in August
1940 and patented it in February 1941. It used a
spherically concentric meniscus and was only suitable as
a monochromatic astronomical camera. In a later design
he added a cemented doublet to correct chromatic
aberration. Dmitri Maksutov built a prototype for a
similar type of meniscus telescope, the Maksutov
telescope, in October 1941 and patented it in November
of that same year. His design corrected spherical and
chromatic aberrations by placing a weak negative-shaped
meniscus corrector closer to the primary mirror.
 In sub-aperture corrector designs, the corrector
elements are usually at the focus of a much
larger objective. These elements can be both
lenses and mirrors, but since multiple surfaces
are involved, achieving good aberration
correction in these systems can be very
complex. Examples of sub-aperture corrector
catadioptric telescopes include the Argunov–
Cassegrain telescope, the Klevtsov–Cassegrain
telescope and sub-aperture corrector Maksutovs,
which use as a "secondary mirror" an optical
group consisting of lens elements and sometimes
mirrors designed to correct aberration, as well
as Jones-Bird Newtonian telescopes, which use a
spherical primary mirror combined with a small
corrector lens mounted near the focus.
 Liquid mirror telescopes are telescopes with mirrors made with a
reflective liquid. The most common liquid used is mercury, but other
liquids will work as well (for example, low melting alloys of gallium).
The liquid and its container are rotated at a constant speed around a
vertical axis, which causes the surface of the liquid to assume
a paraboloidal shape, suitable for use as the primary mirror of
a reflecting telescope. The rotating liquid assumes
the paraboloidal shape regardless of the container's shape. To reduce
the amount of liquid metal needed, and thus weight, a rotating
mercury mirror uses a container that is as close to the necessary
parabolic shape as possible. Liquid mirrors can be a low cost
alternative to conventional large telescopes. Compared to a solid
glass mirror that must be cast, ground, and polished, a rotating liquid
metal mirror is much less expensive to manufacture.
 Isaac Newton noted that the free surface of a rotating liquid forms a
circular paraboloid and can therefore be used as a telescope, but he
could not actually build one because he had no way to stabilize the
speed of rotation.The concept was further developed by Ernesto
Capocci of the Naples Observatory (1850), but it was not until 1872
that Henry Skey of Dunedin, New Zealand constructed the first
working laboratory liquid mirror telescope.
 Another difficulty is that a liquid metal mirror can only be
used in zenith telescopes, i.e., that look straight, so it is not
suitable for investigations where the telescope must remain
pointing at the same location of inertial space (a possible
exception to this rule may exist for a mercury mirror space
telescope, where the effect of Earth's gravity is replaced
by artificial gravity, perhaps by rotating the telescope on a
very long tether, or propelling it gently forward with rockets).
Only a telescope located at the North Pole or South Pole would
offer a relatively static view of the sky, although the freezing
point of mercury and the remoteness of the location would
need to be considered. A very large telescope already exists at
the South Pole, but the North Pole is located in the Arctic
Ocean.
 Currently, the mercury mirror of the Large Zenith Telescope in
Canada is the largest liquid metal mirror in operation. It has a
diameter of six meters, and rotates at a rate of about
8.5 revolutions per minute.
Parabolic shape formed by a liquid surface under rotation. Two liquids
of different densities fill a narrow space between two sheets of
transparent plastic. The gap between the sheets is closed at the
bottom, sides and top. The whole assembly is rotating around a vertical
axis passing through the centre.
 Radio telescopes are directional radio antennas used for radio
astronomy. The dishes are sometimes constructed of a conductive
wire mesh whose openings are smaller than the wavelength being
observed. Multi-element Radio telescopes are constructed from pairs
or larger groups of these dishes to synthesize large 'virtual' apertures
that are similar in size to the separation between the telescopes; this
process is known as aperture synthesis As of 2005, the current record
array size is many times the width of the Earth—utilizing space-
based Very Long Baseline Interferometry(VLBI) telescopes such as
the Japanese HALCA (Highly Advanced Laboratory for Communications
and Astronomy) VSOP (VLBI Space Observatory Program) satellite.
Aperture synthesis is now also being applied to optical telescopes
using optical interferometers (arrays of optical telescopes)
and aperture masking interferometry at single reflecting telescopes.
Radio telescopes are also used to collect microwave radiation, which
is used to collect radiation when any visible light is obstructed or
faint, such as from quasars. Some radio telescopes are used by
programs such as SETI and the Arecibo Observatory to search for
extraterrestrial life.
The 64-meter radio telescope
at Parkes Observatory as seen
in 1969, when it was used to
receive live televised footage
from Apollo .
 X-ray telescopes can use X-ray optics, such as
a Wolter telescopes composed of ring-shaped
'glancing' mirrors made of heavy metals that are
able to reflect the rays just a few degrees. The
mirrors are usually a section of a
rotated parabola and a hyperbola, or ellipse. In
1952, Hans Wolter outlined 3 ways a telescope
could be built using only this kind of
mirror. Examples of an observatory using this
type of telescope are the Einstein
Observatory, ROSAT, and the Chandra X-Ray
Observatory. By 2010, Wolter focusing X-ray
telescopes are possible up to 79 keV.
SIGMA INSTRUMENT
 Higher energy X-ray and Gamma-ray telescopes refrain from focusing
completely and use coded aperture masks: the patterns of the
shadow the mask creates can be reconstructed to form an image.
 X-ray and Gamma-ray telescopes are usually on Earth-
orbiting satellites or high-flying balloons since the Earth's atmosphere
is opaque to this part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, high
energy X-rays and gamma-rays do not form an image in the same way
as telescopes at visible wavelengths. An example of this type of
telescope is the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
 The detection of very high energy gamma rays, with shorter
wavelength and higher frequency than regular gamma rays, requires
further specialization. An example of this type of observatory
is VERITAS. Very high energy gamma-rays are still photons, like visible
light, whereas cosmic rays includes particles like electrons, protons,
and heavier nuclei.
 A discovery in 2012 may allow focusing gamma-ray telescopes . At
photon energies greater than 700 keV, the index of refraction starts
to increase again.
 A cosmic-ray observatory is a scientific installation
built to detect high-energy-particles coming from
space called cosmic rays. This typically includes
photons (high-energy light), electrons, protons, and
some heavier nuclei, as well as antimatter particles.
About 90% of cosmic rays are protons, 9% are alpha
particles, and the rest are other particles
 It is not yet possible to build image forming optics for
cosmic rays, like a Wolter telescope for lower
energy X-rays, although some cosmic-ray
observatories also look for high energy gamma rays
and x-rays. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHEC)
pose further detection problems. One way of learning
about cosmic rays is using different detectors to
observe aspects of a cosmic ray air shower.
 A gravitational-wave observatory (or gravitational-
wave detector) is any device designed to
measure gravitational waves, tiny distortions
of spacetime that were first predicted by Einstein in
1916. Gravitational waves are perturbations in the
theoretical curvature of spacetime caused by
accelerated masses. The existence of gravitational
radiation is a specific prediction of general relativity,
but is a feature of all theories of gravity that
obey special relativity. Since the 1960s, gravitational-
wave detectors have been built and constantly
improved. The present-day generation of resonant
mass antennas and laser interferometers has reached
the necessary sensitivity to detect gravitational
waves from sources in the Milky Way. Gravitational-
wave observatories are the primary tool
of gravitational-wave astronomy.
A number of experiments have provided
indirect evidence, notably the observation
of binary pulsars, the orbits of which evolve
precisely matching the predictions of energy
loss through general relativistic gravitational-
wave emission. The 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics
was awarded for this work.
 In February 2016, the Advanced LIGO
team announced that they had detected
gravitational waves from a black hole merger.
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded
for this work.
A schematic diagram of a laser
interferometer.
 A neutrino detector is a physics apparatus which is
designed to study neutrinos. Because neutrinos
only weakly interact with other particles of matter,
neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a
significant number of neutrinos. Neutrino detectors
are often built underground, to isolate the detector
from cosmic rays and other background
radiation. The field of neutrino astronomy is still
very much in its infancy – the only confirmed
extraterrestrial sources so far are
the Sun and supernova SN 1987A. Neutrino
observatories will "give astronomers fresh eyes with
which to study the universe."
 The proposed acoustic detection of neutrinos via
the thermoacoustic effect is the subject of
dedicated studies done by the ANTARES, IceCube,
and KM3NeT collaborations.
 Various detection methods have been
used. Super Kamiokande is a large volume of
water surrounded by phototubes that watch for
the Cherenkov radiation emitted when an
incoming neutrino creates
an electron or muon in the water. The Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory is similar, but uses heavy
water as the detecting medium. Other detectors
have consisted of large volumes of chlorine
or gallium which are periodically checked for
excesses of argon or germanium, respectively,
which are created by neutrinos interacting with
the original substance. MINOS uses a solid
plastic scintillator watched
by phototubes; Borexino uses a
liquid pseudocumene scintillator also watched
by phototubes; and the NOνAdetector uses a
liquid scintillator watched by avalanche
photodiodes.