Resolving Power of Telescope
Objects such as binary stars, individual stars, distant galaxies, and planets subtend small angles on a telescope. A larger aperture is needed to resolve these small angles and improve the resolving power of the telescope. Rayleigh’s criterion can be used to determine the resolving power of the telescope. The resolving power is inversely proportional to the angular separation between two distant objects. According to Rayleigh’s resolving power of optical instruments formula,
Δθ = 1.22(λ/d)
The resolving power is the reciprocal of angular separation:
Resolving Power = 1/Δθ = 1 / (1.22λ/d) = d/1.22λ
Thus, the higher the value of d or the diameter of the aperture, the better will be the resolution of the telescope. Astronomical optical telescopes have mirror diameters as large as 10 m to obtain the best resolution.
Resolving Power of a Microscope and Telescope
Wave optics, also known as Physical optics, deals with the study of various phenomena such as diffraction, polarization, interference, resolution, and other occurrences. Wave optics is the segment of optics that focuses on the study and behavior of light and its wave characteristics. Wave optics particularly describes the connection between waves and rays of light. According to the wave theory of light, light is a form of energy, it travels through a medium in the form of transverse wave motion. The speed of light traveling through a medium depends upon the nature of the medium.
Here, the approximation is carried out by using ray optics for the estimation of the field on a surface. Integrating ray-estimated field over a mirror, lens, or aperture for the calculation of the scattered or transmitted field also gets involved later on. Wave optics stands as a witness to the scientific study of understanding the nature of light. One is the particle nature of light and the other is the wave nature of light.
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