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Newton's reflector


The first reflecting telescope built by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668 is a landmark in the history of telescopes, being the first known successful reflecting telescope. It was the prototype for a design that later came to be called a newtonian telescope.

Isaac Newton built his reflecting telescope as a proof for his theory that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours. He had concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). The telescope he constructed used mirrors as the objective which bypass that problem. To create the primary mirror Newton used a custom composition of metal consisting of six parts copper to two parts tin, an early composition of speculum metal. He devised means for shaping and grinding the mirror and may have been the first to use a pitch lap to polish the optical surface. He chose a spherical shape for his mirror instead of a parabola to simplify construction: he had satisfied himself that the chromatic, and not the spherical aberration, formed the chief faults of refracting telescopes. He added to his reflector what is the hallmark of the design of a "Newtonian telescope", a secondary "diagonal" mirror near the primary mirror's focus to reflect the image at 90° angle to an eyepiece mounted on the side of the telescope. This unique addition allowed the image to be viewed with minimal obstruction of the objective mirror. He also made all the tube, mount, and fittings.


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