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So let’s just talk a little bit about a telescope. Our eye is the telescope we all are used to. It’s a little tiny five millimeter telescope, and it serves us very well. But if we make telescopes bigger, we get a couple of good things. We have larger telescopes and they collect a lot more light so we can see things that are fainter. But it turns out they greatly improve detail. And that’s because of the nature that light is a wave, and wave effects are what we call quantum mechanical effects, meaning that when you use a little telescope to look at waves, it becomes blurry through what we call diffraction. And so larger telescopes are extremely useful to improve detail. The other thing that telescopes allow us to do is to put modern digital detectors behind them. Our eye is about the same sensitivity as a photographic plate. A photographic plate can be sat there and it can look at the sky for an hour so it can see fainter. But modern digital detectors are almost 100 times more efficient than our eyes at collecting light. And so you can improve things by a factor of 100. That’s like building a telescope ten times bigger. And so that improvement has been one of the things that’s allowed astronomy to do so much in the optical regime in the last 30 years.

Telescopes enhance our ability to observe the universe beyond what our eyes can see. Larger telescopes collect more light, improving detail due to wave diffraction effects. Additionally, modern digital detectors are nearly 100 times more efficient than human eyes, significantly enhancing light collection. These advancements have greatly advanced optical astronomy over the past 30 years.