Astronomy Ch 6

Your friend, a graduate student in astronomy, is giving you a special tour of the local observatory. You notice that you are viewing the image from the big telescope from underneath the primary mirror; the beam of light has come through a small hole in the main mirror to an eyepiece below. This telescope uses what focusing arrangement?

Cassegrain Focus

Our textbook discusses that radio astronomers are building more and more arrays of radio telescopes, where many "dishes" are connected together. What advantage do such arrays have?

They provide a higher resolution that individual dishes

A graduate student is trying to follow the weather on Jupiter for her PhD thesis. To see the big weather patterns in the upper atmosphere of the planet, she needs to have excellent resolution. What type of telescope would be best for her to use?

a large reflector located in orbit above the Earth's atmosphere

What type of telescope can be used routinely on the surface of the Earth during the DAY?

a radio telescope

Which of the following is not an advantage that a reflector telescope has over a refractor telescope?

a reflector doesn't have to do deal with the twinkling of the stars, as a refractor does.

Which of the following is NOT a detector of radiation from space that astronomers have used?

a refracting telescope

To overcome the problems that blur images and don't provide the best resolution from Earth, astronomers have started using flexible mirrors that change shape many times each second. This technique is called:

adaptive optics

Which of the following has a longer integration time (can collect light for a longer period of time) than the human eye?

all of the above

Why do telescopes have to have a good motorized drive system to move them quickly and smoothly?

bc the earth is rotating, with the telescope attached to it

When the James Webb Space Telescope is finally launched, what will be its distinguishing characteristic (what about it will really help astronomers)?

it will have the largest mirror ever put into space for observing faint objects

The size of the device that collects radiation (such as light) is called a telescope's:

magnification

The Chandra Observatory orbiting the Earth is designed to

search for infra-red waves from stars that are in the process of being born

To break up light into the component colors that it contains, astronomers use a device called

spectrometer

Which of the following is NOT an advantage that the Hubble Space Telescope has over large telescopes on Earth?

the Hubble has a larger aperture than any visible-light telescopes on Earth

Which of the following major telescopes was not located in space?

the Keck Telescope

Of the following, which has the highest resolution (ability to make out fine detail):

the Very Long Baseline Array of Radio Telescopes, stretching from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii

When a knowledgeable amateur astronomer tells you that she has a 14-inch telescope, what does the number 14 refer to?

the diameter of the primary lens or mirror

When the twin Keck telescopes were built in the 1990's, what distinguished them from other very large telescopes of the time?

they used a mirror assembly that was made of 36 smaller hexagonal mirrors working together

In the summer of 1996, the European Space Agency announced that it would be suspending the operations of the International Ultraviolet Explorer. Astronomers who were most unhappy about that announcements were likely to be studying what types of objects?

very hot stars

Radio telescopes of modest size can't make out as much detail (have a lower resolution) than visible light telescopes. How do astronomers overcome this limitation?

we can connect several radio telescopes some distance apart together electronically to give us the resolution of a larger telescope