i understand how light and photography works, but it baffles me how telescopes can be so precise, and how they can ”collect” light from so far away. Idk please help me understand them a bit better
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Just imagine light as billions of photons sent out in all directions at once. When you “see” something, that means some of those photons have reached your detection equipment, i.e. your eyes.
If you see something “very far away”, that just means that the photons you picked up have travelled for a looooooong time to reach you, but they are still the same as the photons from short distance objects. However, since you are much farther away from the source, you probably only picked up very few of these photons compared to if you were very close to it (remember, it sent out photons in all directions, but still just a finite amount). So while the individual photons are the same as others, you have much much fewer reaching your detection equipment.
Now with a large telescope, you simply increase the size of your detection equipment, so that you can now pick up not just the photons which hit your eye, but also those that would have flown by your eyes (i.e. you would have missed them). So all the telescope is doing is increasing the chance of catching photons from that far away object, and thus make it appear brighter in the picture.
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