Talk:Aerial telescope

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A fact from Aerial telescope appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 15 May 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the aerial telescope is a type of very long focal length refracting telescope built in the second half of the 17th century that did not use a tube?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/May.

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Telescope equations[edit]

@User:Fountains_of_Bryn_Mawr I thought I'd post here instead of going back and forth in the edit log, and also made an account as apparently that is the norm.

So first off my apologies if I am doing something wrong, I am not a 'wikipedia native' when it comes to editing, just someone who is interested in the history of astronomy and wants to update some Huygens related pages.

So the article that I linked before is about Huygens' telescopes, and about how he made them. It describes the equations that he used to make them, and absolutely includes the aerial telescopes that he made, as well as describing why they are not performing at the level where they should. e.g. Why Huygens could not see the Cassini division, while Cassini could.

In my opinion these are relevant facts that should be added to this page, and I am not sure how it is spam. Maybe because I was too blunt on the incersion?

How about something like;

Like his shorter telescopes, the aerial telescopes made by the Huygens brothers were made after a set of empirical equations derived by Christiaan. Presumably due to his myopia the equations resulted in telescopes that overmagnify by a factor of 3.5, and thus did not work optimally. It is likely due to these sub optimal designs that Huygens did not manage to resolve the Cassini division during his observations, despite his lenses being of superior quality over those of Campani. This issue of lacking sharpness has been remarked by several users after Huygens' death. Most notably by by James Pound and James Bradley in 1720, who compared a 123-ft aerial telescope to a 6-inch reflector by John Hadley, finding the sharpness to be about equal but noting that the hugenian image was brighter. A second comparison was made by Frederik Kaiser in 1847, who remarked that while the lenses were of excellent quality, they were not capable of resolving certain binary stars that could be resolved by smaller telescopes from his time.

Then link to https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0054

https://books.google.se/books?id=8z1UAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA418#v=onepage&q&f=false (e.g. translated: and 8 times shorter than those of HUYGENS with the same apertures. The ratio therefore becomes noticeably less favorable for HUYGENS viewers as they grow larger) See pp 426

https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/8318/1/John_Roger_Fisher-2004-PhD-Thesis.pdf (Page 33)

I hope that this clears things up.

Also, there is a 2nd replica in France made by Dollfus in the 90's, which I could add some info about. Huygens17 (talk) 05:43, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There has been an attempt to add this reference to this article on 4 different ocasions[1][2][3][4], all by short edit accounts or WP:SPA accounts who also spammed it across other articles. That makes this look more like WP:REFSPAM than an attempt to improve Wikipedia. This article is about Aerial telescopes, not specifics on how the Huygens may have designed telescopes in general. Like I said originally, this belongs in Christiaan Huygens, if it can be made encyclopedic. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 21:14, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry for that, it was not my intent. It took a while to understand that this was not the way, but I hope that we can iterate over something acceptable now.

As a member of the 17th century telescope fb page, I can attest that this kind of information is useful for those who try to replicate these telescopes, especially knowing that there are equations that were used, both those by huygens and the ideal ones for making one of these telescopes. I also believe that it is relevant to mention that they were governed by a set of equations

This article by Dolfus also compares the aerial telescopes specifically to one of the equations and shows that they match. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998LAstr.112..114D/abstract The article itself is not open access, but here is the figure in question. https://imgur.com/EsdqHCW

One could talk about the general equations on Huygens' page, but I feel like it makes more sense to discuss it here, given that his page does not go into such technical details about his inventions. Huygens17 (talk) 08:52, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not a how-to guide nor is it a discussion forum on how to make something. Information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful. It boils down to "Christiaan had tables" - the reader will ask "whats that have to do with the cost of tea in China?". Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 13:34, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So would you say the equations fit under the keplerian refractor, since they describe the ideal one? Also what about the part that Huygens' telescopes were used to test early reflectors, the other source I posted. Same for the other replica. Huygens17 (talk) 19:02, 21 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In general, we are here to improve articles, not shoehorn in something we are interested in. Information about Huygens' suspected bad eyesight would belongs in Christiaan Huygens, but it should be worded as opinion of the papers author. The part where Huygens' telescopes were used to test early reflectors is already covered in the "Obsolescence" section. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 00:43, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]