To reduce colour troubles to a _minimum_ M. Deloncle proposed that the object-lens should have a focal distance of about two hundred feet, since a long focus is more easily corrected than a short one, and a diameter of over fifty-nine inches. The need for so huge a lens arises out of the optical principles of a refractor. The rays from an object--a star, for instance--strike the object-glass at the near end, and are bent by it into a converging beam, till they all meet at the focus. Behind the focus they again separate, and are caught by the eyepiece, which reduces them to a parallel beam small enough to enter the pupil. We thus see that though the unaided eye gathers only the few rays that fall directly from the object on to the pupil, when helped by the telescope it receives the concentrated rays falling on the whole area of the object-glass; and it would be sensible of a greatly increased brightness had not this light to be redistributed over the image, which is the object magnified by the eyepiece. Assuming the aperture of the pupil to be one-tenth of an inch, and the object to be magnified a hundred times, the object-lens should have a hundred times the diameter of the pupil to render the image as bright as the object itself. If the lens be five instead of ten inches across, a great loss of light results, as in the high powers of a microscope, and the image loses in distinctness what it gains in size.
As M. Deloncle meant his telescope to beat all records in respect of magnification, he had no choice but to make a lens that should give proportionate illumination, and itself be of unprecedented size.
At first M. Deloncle met with considerable opposition and ridicule. Such a scheme as his was declared to be beyond accomplishment. But in spite of many prophecies of ultimate failure he set to work, entrusting the construction of the various portions of his colossal telescope to well-tried experts. To M. Gautier was given the task of making all the mechanical parts of the apparatus; to M. Mantois the casting of the giant lenses; to M. Despret the casting of the huge mirror, to which reference will be made immediately.
The first difficulty to be encountered arose from the sheer size of the instrument. It was evidently impossible to mount such a leviathan in the ordinary way. A tube, 180 feet long, could not be made rigid enough to move about and yet permit careful observation of the stars. Even supposing that it were satisfactorily mounted on an "equatorial foot" like smaller glasses, how could it be protected from wind and weather? To cover it, a mighty dome, two hundred feet or more in diameter, would be required; a dome exceeding by over seventy feet the cupola of St. Peter's, Rome; and this dome must revolve easily on its base at a pace of about fifty feet an hour, so that the telescope might follow the motion of the heavenly bodies.