Newton's reflector  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump
to: navigation, search A replica of the Newton - Wickins
telescope, Newton's third reflecting telescope that was
presented to the Royal Society in 1766 after being restored by
Thomas Heath. It is described as the better of the instruments
Newton built.[1]  The first reflecting telescope built by Sir
Isaac Newton in 1668[2] is a landmark in the history of
telescopes, being the first known successful reflecting
telescope.[3][4] It was the prototype for a design that later
came to be called a newtonian telescope.   Isaac Newton built
his reflecting telescope as a proof for his theory that white
light is composed of a spectrum of colours.[5] He had concluded
that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the
dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). The
telescope he constructed used mirrors as the objective which
bypass that problem. To create the primary mirror Newton used a
custom composition of metal consisting of six pa