Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/228

 at will, yet they are turned out with increasing frequency, and the best artists are generally able, at all times, to approximate so closely to perfection that any shortcoming may be disregarded.

In what is said above I refer, of course, to the refracting telescope, which is the form of instrument that I should recommend to all amateurs in preference to the reflector. But, before proceeding further, it may be well to recall briefly the principal



points of difference between these two kinds of telescopes. The purpose of a telescope of either description is, first, to form an image of the object looked at by concentrating the rays of light proceeding from that object at a focus. The refractor achieves this by means of a carefully shaped lens, called the object glass, or objective. The reflector, on the other hand, forms the image at the focus of a concave mirror.

A very pretty little experiment, which illustrates these two methods of forming an optical image, and, by way of corollary.