--- title: Telescopes and light — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Telescopes and light», a lesson of the space course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A telescope is above all a light bucket: its main job is to collect as much light as possible, so faint things show up clearly. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/) / Telescopes and light # Telescopes and light Lesson 27 of the space course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/space/27-telescopes-and-light/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/0/) — A telescope is above all a light bucket: its main job is to collect as much light as possible, so faint things show up clearly. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/2/) — Light we see is only one small part of a much wider family of rays, from radio waves to gamma rays, and each kind of telescope "sees" a different part. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/3/) — Air blurs and blocks some light, so big telescopes sit on high dry mountains, and some telescopes go up into space. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/4/) — In 1609-1610 Galileo's homemade telescope showed moons going round Jupiter; today giant mirrors and dishes see galaxies near the edge of the visible universe. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/5/) — In 1609-1610 Galileo used a small homemade telescope to discover four moons of Jupiter, mountains on the Moon and the phases of Venus. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/6/) — Telescopes gather light either with lenses (refractors) or with curved mirrors (reflectors). - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/7/) — Isaac Newton built an early working reflecting telescope in 1668. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/9/) — Big telescopes are built on high, dry mountains such as Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Atacama Desert in Chile. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/10/) — The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, orbits above the air, but its mirror was wrongly shaped and astronauts fixed it in 1993. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/11/) — The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, has a gold-coated mirror 6.5 metres wide and works about 1.5 million km from Earth, about four times as far away as the Moon. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/12/) — Light we can see is only a small part of a wider range that includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/13/) — Radio telescopes are giant dishes that collect radio waves from space, like the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, 76 metres wide. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/14/) — The Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales helped relay television pictures of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk to the world in 1969. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/15/) — X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes have to work in space, because Earth's atmosphere blocks those rays. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/16/) — The Vera C. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/17/) — Rubin Observatory in Chile released its first images in 2025. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/18/) — The Extremely Large Telescope, with a 39-metre mirror, is being built in Chile and is planned to see first light around 2030. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/19/) — Never look at the Sun through a telescope or binoculars: it can blind you in an instant. - ← previous: [Exoplanets and the search for life](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/) - next →: [How we know: measuring the sky](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/28-how-we-know-measuring-the-sky/) - ↑ back to [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/)