Learn About Parts of Our Collection
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This ball lens is quite large, isnât it? Itâs not likely what you think of when you hear the word lens. You probably think of a pair of eyeglasses when you hear the word lens, but this large ball and some glasses really do have a lot in common. All a lens is a piece of glasses with precision surfaces cut and polished on either side of it. The thickness, shape, and type of glass all contribute to how powerful of a lens it is. There arenât really two sides to this particular lens since itâs a ball, but the idea is the same! You can see it act as a magnifying glass as you hold up objects to it, or even if a friend puts their face on the far side of it from you. Give it a try! This lens was polished here at the college and was donated by OâHara Glass.Â
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Welcome to one of the crowning jewels of the Museum of Optics! Depending on the angle you first viewed it, however, it might have just looked like a funny-shaped piece of glass to you at first. Have you walked all the way around it yet? Once you look at it face-on, everything comes into focus. Now you understand that itâs not a funny piece of glass, but that a lot of math went into the shape of this piece. The main wedge of the desert flower is designed for total internal reflection or a process by which an internal reflection acts like a perfect mirror. The two sides acting as mirrors help to cascade the few cuts on the back of the glass to appear to be the full flower shape you see before your eyes. This total internal reflection process is very useful not just in art, but it also keeps light inside of the optical fibers that bring the internet to your home. Since the reflection off each surface is perfectly reflective, no energy is lost from the light bouncing through the fiber for the hundreds of miles it may need to travel. In the Desert flower though, it completes this beautiful piece through those many reflections. The desert flower was made by Christopher Reid and donated to the museum by Schott Glass.Â
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In this display, you may notice some orange material between two pieces of glass. This is a special mixture of materials that you can use to make holograms. While the word âhologramâ conjures up mental images from across sci-fi movies, theyâre actually a real optical process. A hologram is a special optical element that makes light appear to be coming from an object even when an object isnât actually there. Picture a ball floating in a pool, and now picture a water wave reflecting off of it. You can likely see the wave bouncing off of the ball picking up the shape of the ball in the reflection. Light, which also acts as a wave, picks up information from the objects it reflects off of that we eventually experience as shapes and colors in our eyes. A hologram is a way to make the light waves appear to be coming from an object artificially, making three-dimensional objects appear from behind or in front of these flat pieces of glass. When these hologram plates are being used, an electrical voltage is applied across them via transparent electrodes etched into the pieces of glass. A laser beam controlled by a computer program is used to write the hologram across the material. Once itâs done, the three-dimensional image can be seen. This material was designed in the 3D holography lab here at the college.Â
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Youâve probably seen telescopes like these in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or other films from seafaring eras. These long-draw telescopes in their simplest forms are a pair of lenses, one near the front, and the other near your eye. The designer of the telescope can choose how much magnification it gives by deciding which lenses to pair together, as the ratio of how much optical power they have compared to each other will decide this. The designer also has to make sure it works with the final lens in the system: your eye! The muscles in your eye that adjust whether things are in focus far away or near are relaxed when youâre looking at distant objects, so itâs most comfortable for you to use a device like a telescope if your eyeâs muscles are relaxed. The telescope is designed such that the light entering your eye behaves as though it is coming from far away, making for comfortable long-term use. This is also how modern binoculars are designed to work. Several of the telescopes in this collection here are some of the oldest pieces here in the museum, which you can tell from the animal skin housings used on these pieces.