Curious Minds Did You Know: The Newtonian telescope is the first known functional telescope which uses a mirror. It was built in 1668 with the purpose of proving Newton's theory that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours, which was later proved to be correct!
The Newton Telescope from Astromedia is a fully functioning reflecting telescope with Dobsonian mounting. Two eyepieces provide magnification factors of 16 and 30, powerful enough to see craters on the Moon and even the Moons of Jupiter! The Newton telescope consists of a primary concave mirror and a secondary flat mirror which is at an angle to reflect the light in to the eyepiece. Reflecting mirrors tend to be better than refracting mirrors as they avoid chromatic aberration and thus the majority of the worlds telescopes use mirrors!
