I know they help us see further away but I just can’t picture in my head how they work.
Especially when people talk about building bigger to look at galaxies 8 plus billion light years away, surely we’re not looking that far distance wise we’re just catching the light at the telescope so if the light has taken that long and traveled to us surely it’s just as close now as the light from our sun that took 8 minutes so wouldn’t a pair on binoculars work just as well?
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The main thing is that the atmosphere does some things to light that we would like to avoid. To a powerful telescope, looking out through the atmosphere is like us trying to look at the ceiling from the bottom of a pool of water; it gets all fuzzy and distorted. On top of that, light from the ground can bounce off the atmosphere back down, and go into the telescope. Putting the telescope outside the atmosphere lets us avoid those problems.
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