Big, Bigger, Biggest - Telescopes

We begin the brand new weeklong series 'Big, Bigger, Biggest' today. Well, as the name suggests, I will be attempting to post some of the world's biggest objects in this one week. We will start today with Telescopes.

So a telescope is an instrument designed for observation of any remote object that is generally very far away from the telescope. There are three main types of Telescopes. They are Refractor Telescopes, Reflector Telescopes and Combined Lens-Mirror Systems. In this post, we will briefly discuss the biggest telescopes of the 2 most widely used types of Telescopes- The Refracting and the Reflecting Telescopes.

The Biggest Optical Refracting Telescope: The Great Paris Exhibition Telescope of 1900, with an objective lens of 1.25m, was the Largest Optical Refracting Telescope in the ever constructed. It was built as the centerpiece of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900. Due to its extremely large size, the telescope was mounted in a fixed horizontal position, and it was also difficult to be pointed at astronomical objects and was not suited for scientific use.

The Biggest Optical Reflecting Telescope: The Large Binocular Telescope located on 10,700-foot Mount Graham in the Pinaleno Mountains of southeastern Arizona and is a part of the Mount Graham International Observatory is one of the world's highest resolution and most technologically advanced optical telescopes. It was built in 2004 and has an aperture of 464.6 approxiamately.

If there is any mistake regarding the factual accuracy in this fact, please be free to point it out by commenting or mailing us as different sources list different material. More 'Big' coming up tomorrow...