Lab #10

Geometric Optics: Making a Telescope

Lab Description
Today we are going to use various materials to study the basis of geometric optics and construct a telescope.

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Learning Goals 1. To reinforce Snells law of refraction. 2. To reinforce the behavior of light in lenses. 3. To see geometric optics in action. Background
Before people knew about electromagnetic radiation and the wave nature of light, they had studied lights properties in depth. This study is what we now call geometric optics. We call it this because the underlying assumption of the study is that light moves in straight lines, and that it doesnt interact with the materials it is passing through. In light of the wave theory of light put forward by Maxwell, we now understand that light has this property because the wavelengths involved are much smaller than any other length scale in the problem, so assuming that light moves in straight lines is a pretty good approximation of its behavior. The first recorded observation that light bends when traveling through different materials was made by Ibn Sahl, of Baghdad, in 984 AD. He worked out how certain lenses focused light. Snells law was derived in the Western world about five hundred years later, by a number of people in the early to mid-1600s. Once people understood how lenses worked, by bending light, inventors went about making better lenses.

Physical Materials 1. Pins 2. An unknown block 3. Cork board 4. Protractor 5. Candle 6. Rail 7. Two lenses 8. Screen Conceptual Materials 1. Geometric optics 2. Snells Law 3. Lenses

In the latter part of the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton realized that light was made up of inseparable colors. He came to this realization by shining white light through a prism and noticing the rainbow it produced. He then tried to perform the same prism experiment on individual colors of light, with no luck (individual colors would not separate into a rainbow when shone through a prism) and deduced that individual colors were pure colors. This observation, coupled with Snells law, helped to explain why rainbows were seen around images in telescopes, a phenomenon known as chromatic aberration. Newton solved this problem in telescopes (still present today in any telescope that uses a lens) by designing one that made use of mirrors instead of lenses. Today, we are going to use Snells law to find the index of refraction of an unknown material. We will then study the properties of lenses, or objects that focus light. Once we understand lenses, we will construct a simple telescope based on lenses.

Procedure

Follow these directions closely. Make your own data tables. Think about what you are measuring and what you want to calculate to come up with these tables. You will be creating your own version of figure 9 (this figure is at the top of the second page of this lab). Carefully use a straight edge to draw all lines. To make a normal (perpendicular) line, use the corner of a book: place one edge of the book along the straight line you have already, with the corner at the place where you want your normal line to start. This gives half of the line; continue the other half on the other side using a straight edge.

Lab #10- Geometric Optics: Making a Telescope

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1. Put the transparent block on a blank sheet of paper, which should be on the cork board. Trace its outline with a pencil. (Do not use colored pencils or pens, which can damage the block.) Then remove the block. 2. Draw a normal line (N) coming off the top of the rectangle, and going into the middle of the rectangle. This line intersects the rectangle at the point O. 3. Choose and draw 1 using a protractor (the line is marked I). It should be between 20 and 60, because this range of angles works best. 4. Line up two pins (P1 and P2) on the 1 line. To make sure they are vertical and lined up, you must crouch so that your face is next to the table, keeping the pins at eye level. 5. Put the block back in the rectangle. Move to its other side, and look through the edge of the block to see the pins. You will have to move your head around the block until you can see the two pins line up perfectly. 6. Line up two more pins (P3 and P4) with the image you see of the first two pins. All four pins should now look like they make a straight line; that is, you should only be able to see the closest pin, and all the others should be hidden behind it. 7. Remove the block and the pins. 8. Draw a line (R) for 4. This line should go through the holes that were made by P3 and P4. 9. At the point where R intersects the rectangle (O), draw a normal line (N) from the middle of the rectangle going down past the bottom of the rectangle. You can now measure 4 with a protractor. 10. Draw a line connecting O and O. You can now measure 2 and 3. For the second trial, repeat the whole process a second time with a different initial angle 1. You can use the same piece of paper if you use different colors of pencils or pens.

Lab #10- Geometric Optics: Making a Telescope

Part II: Refraction through Convex Lenses

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If you are using a candle as your light source, please be very careful with it. Obviously it can cause damage if it falls over. Less obviously, there will be wax dripping off your candle, which can cause a big mess. Leave a piece of paper underneath the candle whenever it is lit, to catch dripping wax. At the end of the lab, please clean up and throw away any wax from your table and equipment. Mount the light source (also referred to as the object), lens, and screen on the rail, in that order. The rail has a ruler marked on it so you can measure distances easily. You will be picking the object distance o. This is the distance between the light source and the lens. Then you will measure the resulting image distance i. To find this, you must move the screen until there is a focused image on it. Be sure you move the screen forward and back into unfocused regions so you can find the spot with the best possible focus. When we say image, we mean only this best-focused image. You will also measure the sizes of the object and image, So and Si. If you are using a candle as your light source, the object size might change a lot. You need to watch for this when measuring your image size. The size measurements will enable you to compare the theoretically expected magnification, which is i / o, to the measured magnification, m = Si / So. Choose various object distances, and make the following table. You should practice this before you actually take data. Your instructor will give you an approximate value of the focal length f. You should try measuring points that have o ranging from less than f up to at least 2.5f, perhaps farther if this is practical. Some of these points will not be useful for your table, but you will have to answer questions about them later. Make a data table, with ten trials, with the following six columns: o (cm) i (cm) So (cm) Si (cm) i / o m = Si / So Make graphs of the following: Graph 1. Plot i vs o. Graph 2. Plot 1 / i vs 1 / o. You should be able to do a fit to determine the focal length. Which fit should you use? Q2. Describe what happened when o was less than f, and tell why you did or did not include points in this range in your data. Q3. Repeat Q2, considering points when o was greater than f instead. Q4. If you could measure a point with an infinite object distance, that is, o = , what would happen to the other values you measured? Q5. Did you find that the theoretical and measured values of the magnification m agreed with each other? Did your f from the fit agree with the value you were given initially? What are the main sources of error in this part of the experiment? Part III: Compound Lenses Make a telescope using two convex lenses (one of which should be the one you used in part II). Use it to look at an object that is far away from you. You must calculate the necessary distance between the two lenses, but then you should adjust the distance while looking through the telescope to get a good focus. Note that, in the following table, you must not measure the actual object that you are looking at. Just measure the apparent object size by holding a ruler just a few inches in front of your eye (no lenses are involved here, unless you wear glasses or contact lenses). Then, with the ruler in the same place, measure the new apparent object size when looking through the telescope to get the image height. Record the following: Focal length of objective fo Focal length of eyepiece fe Distance between the lenses Calculated magnification mc = fo / fe Apparent object height So Apparent image height Si Measured magnification mm = Si / So Percent difference between mc and mm Q6. Do mc and mm agree? What are the main sources of error?

Lab #10: Geometric Optics: Making a Telescope

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What to Submit

At the conclusion of the session, BEFORE you leave the lab, you should submit to your TA, via BlackBoard, a lab report that includes the following things, in paragraph form: 1. Your answers to the in-line questions in the lab. 2. Your data tables, in the proper order. They should be in the same document as your questions.