If the purpose of a telescope is to bring far-away things closer to us,
then why do we send some of them so far away?
The main reason to put a telescope into space is to avoid that perpetual troublemaker:
the atmosphere
since astronomers haven't yet figured out how to get rid of it.
And it's a big nuisance.
First off, the atmosphere plane gets in the way,
what with its clouds and smoke and haze than can block light from distant stars or nearby planets.
And even just the air in a clear sky blocks a huge range of the wavelengths of light,
pretty much only letting through visible light, and a smattering of infra-red and radio waves.
The atmosphere is also-
-HEY! Stop that!-
...Distracting
At day, visible light from the sun bounces off of air molecules, and other small particles
and completely overwhelms the light from any other star you might want to look at.
At night, the light from the moon and from human sources bounces off the same paricles
and outshines the light from most distant and faint stars and galaxies,
washing out their images.
The atmosphere AlsO MeSSEs ThINGs up.
Air is constantly moving, and just like a heat mirage, this turbulence blurs and distorts starlight,
which causes stars to twinkle, and telescope images of stars to be blurry
We can avoid all of these nuisances by putting telescopes above the atmosphere, in space.
Plus, there are other benefits;
A space telescope can make observations 24 hours a day,
A space telescope can be put far enough away from the earth's infra-red warmth
and then cooled down really cold so that it can take clean infra-red images,
and a space telescope is a telescope we freaking put in outer space!
Of course, there are some downsides to space telescopes;
It's hard and expensive to get them there,
hard and expensive to fix them if they break or you want to upgrade to newer fancier parts,
hard and expensive to take people there on tours,
but really, How can you argue, with *this*
And this
And, this
And this
And even this
And this
And, this
This too.
And this.
Thank you so much for watching,
This video was supported by the James Webb space telescope project
at the space telescope science institute
where they put telescopes into space so you don't have to deal with stuff like clouds, and rain.
Thanks again for watching,
and thank you again to the James Webb space telescope project for supporting this video