Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Giant ground-based reflector telescopes do much of astronomy's heavy lifting, although the U.S.'s largest in Hawaii is not run by who you might think.

[Hank Green] posted an interesting video about the first liquid mirror telescope from back in the 1850s. At the time, scientists were not impressed. But, these days, people are revisiting the idea.

That secondary mirror, in turn, bounced the light (and thus the image seen) into a convex eyepiece lens built into the side of the tube. This was the first working reflecting telescope.

The telescope can peek into the past, learning how the universe looked 13 billion years ago. It uses real gold-plated mirrors to pierce through the vastness of the cosmos. Telescope mirrors ...