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 point of space telescopes isn’t that they can see objectively further, it’s that they can see clearer without that pesky atmosphere blocking large swathes of wavelengths (infrared and xray/gamma are particularly bad) and distorting everything.
That’s important for “ultra far” views because the light from the furthest objects has been stretched out into infrared.
So a better comparison than telescope vs. binoculars is fog vs. no fog at the worst end, or trying to observe something through binoculars through heat shimmer and without at best. The latter can be amd is regularly done, but it’s just better without it. The former just doesn’t have a solution aside from “go to space”.
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