An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

The first modern refracting telescope which had an outstanding quality. It was built in 1824 by Fraunhofer for the Russian Imperial Observatory in Dorpat, now Tartu in Estonia. It had a 23-cm → achromatic lens and a German-type → equatorial mounting driven by a clockwork. Wilhelm Struve (1793-1864) used the refractor to observe many → visual binaries, and attempted to measure the distances of stars through their visual → parallaxes. He also obtaibned accurate values for the diameters of the → Galilean satellites of → Jupiter.

See also: Named after Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826), German optician and physicist;
→ refractor.