Viewing the light of stars through a telescope as opposed to the naked eye?
hydropowerman34 asked:
Say I wanted to look at a star that was 200 million light years away with my naked eye. The light I’m seeing is from 200 million years ago. Now, if I look at that same star with the Hubble telescope, am I seeing the same light that I saw with my naked eye, or does the telescopic vision capture light from much earlier?
Lots of good information. Thanks.
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Say I wanted to look at a star that was 200 million light years away with my naked eye. The light I’m seeing is from 200 million years ago. Now, if I look at that same star with the Hubble telescope, am I seeing the same light that I saw with my naked eye, or does the telescopic vision capture light from much earlier?
Lots of good information. Thanks.
November 21st, 2009 at 12:09 pm
The light takes the same time to travel here, regardless of the instrument used to “see” it (eye, telescope, photography…) Raymond
November 24th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Hubble just gathers a lot more light. It all left the star at the same time. It just sees stars farther back in time because it can see fainter, or more distant stars. Nomadd
November 24th, 2009 at 10:19 am
You are wrestling with what I have found to be a common misconception. A telescope has no way of “reaching out” to grasp photons that are proceeding toward Earth. The scope sees the same light that you see with your eye, it just:
1. Collects more photons because it is bigger than your eye (so it can see dimmer objects).
2. Focuses all those photons at your eye so that you can see a sharp image.
3. Magnifies the image.
Therefore, the time lag that is occurring on the way to your eye is that same one that occurs on the way to the telescope. The light still travels the same distance, it is what you do with that light once it gets here that makes the difference between seeing Hubble photos and seeing a typical night sky. Larry454
November 25th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
You have to think about it from the perspective of the light. Regardless of how we’re looking at it, the light still took the same amount of time to reach us. All the telescope does is capture more of the light than we can with our naked eye. tastofhevn
November 27th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Just as an off topic correction, our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across and we can only see stars with the naked eye in our galaxy. At 200 million light years, a star would be in another galaxy and at that distance we would be lucky to even see the whole galaxy (with the naked eye). Ottawa Mike