Reflecting telescope

A reflecting telescope forms an image using curved mirrors. Its primary and secondary shapes, spacing and aperture stop determine its optical aberrations, access to the focus, and obstruction.

A Gregorian telescope has a concave parabolic primary and a concave ellipsoidal secondary beyond the primary focus. Light crosses the intermediate focus, reaches the secondary, and returns through the primary to the final focus. The ellipsoid’s two foci are the intermediate and final focus.

A Cassegrain arrangement places a secondary before the primary focus and returns light through a hole in the primary to a focus behind it. In the classical design the primary is parabolic and the secondary convex hyperbolic. The compact arrangement has a long effective focal length; its classical implementation retains off-axis coma.

A Ritchey–Chrétien telescope has hyperbolic primary and secondary mirrors chosen to cancel third-order spherical aberration and coma. It retains astigmatism and field curvature; wide-field instruments may require additional correction.

A classical Cassegrain reflector uses a concave parabolic primary and a convex hyperbolic secondary before the prime focus. The secondary returns the converging beam through a hole in the primary. It corrects on-axis spherical aberration but retains off-axis coma.

A Newtonian telescope uses a concave parabolic primary and a flat diagonal secondary to send the converging beam to a side focus. The primary avoids on-axis spherical aberration, but has off-axis coma.