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Telescopes from the Ground Up
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Chromatic aberration: A problem of lenses
Diagram demonstrating chromatic aberration in a standard convex lens.

Visible light is made of different colors. When visible light passes through a glass lens or prism, it gets dispersed, or split, into its many colors.

A lens focuses each of those colors at a different point, causing a fringe of color to appear around bright objects seen through the lens. This problem is called chromatic aberration.

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