Lesson 12 – Optical Instruments

Basic optical instruments start with a single lens. This can magnify the words on a page by creating a magnified, virtual image of the words. Separating two lenses by the sum of their focal lengths creates a telescope that magnifies distant objects. Many lens elements comprise a camera lens which is used to image nearby objects. Images of microscopic objects are formed by the optics of a microscope. And finally, an essential optical instrument called a spectrometer can analyze the colors within an object scene, assessing the relative proportions of each color to help determine which chemicals may be present based only on the light emitted by or reflected from an object scene.