critical new developments in telescopes

Question

anonymous · Answer

Synthetic apertures.

anonymous · Answer

@Carl_Pham:what is aperture?from what i know its not any material part??

anonymous · Answer

"Aperture" itself means the light-gathering power of the telescope.   (The word literally means "opening" as in the opening to a tunnel.)  Synthetic apertures it the process of combining the output from several telescopes to produces results that are much like what you'd get with one much larger telescope.  It's much cheaper than building the bigger telescope, now that the price of extremely precise and fast electronics has come down.

anonymous · Answer

in physics we often calculate stuff related to lens,say the lensmaker's formule, using the approximation tha the lense has large aperture..i always thought that it meant |dw:1245435643613:dw| as related to the ratio of l/d....is this ratio a measure of light-gathering power of the telescope?