8-3-00
When you use an optical instrument, whether it be something very simple like a magnifying glass, or more complicated like a telescope or microscope, you're usually trying to make things look bigger so you can more easily see fine details. One thing to remember about this is that if you want to make things look bigger, you're always going to use converging mirrors or lenses. Diverging mirrors or lenses always give smaller images.
When using a converging lens, it's helpful to remember these rules of thumb. If the object is very far away, the image will be tiny and very close to the focal point. As the object moves towards the lens, the image moves out from the focal point, growing as it does so. The object and image are exactly the same size when the object is at 2F, twice the focal distance from the lens. Moving the object from 2F towards F, the image keeps moving out away from the lens, and growing, until it goes to infinity when the object is at F, the focal point. Moving the object still closer to the lens, the image steadily comes in towards the lens from minus infinity, and gets smaller the closer the object is to the lens.
Note that similar rules of thumb apply for a converging mirror, too.
A telescope needs at least two lenses. This is because you use a telescope to look at an object very far away, so the first lens creates a small image close to its focal point. The telescope is designed so the real, inverted image created by the first lens is just a little closer to the second lens than its focal length. As with the magnifying glass, this gives a magnified virtual image. This final image is also inverted compared to the original object. With astronomical telescopes, this doesn't really matter, but if you're looking at something on the Earth you generally want an upright image. This can be obtained with a third lens.
Note that the overall effect of the telescope is to magnify, which means the absoulte value of the magnification must be larger than 1. The first lens (the objective) has a magnification smaller than one, so the second lens (the eyepiece) must magnify by a larger factor than the first lens reduces by. To a good approximation, the overall magnification is equal to the ratio of the focal lengths. With o standing for objective and e for eyepiece, the magnification is given by:
m = - fo / fe, with the minus sign meaning that the image is inverted.
Microscopes were actually described, with an example, in the notes from March 31.