Question

Your friend gave you an infrared telescope for your birthday (without a gift recipe), knowing you became fascinated with the astronomical observations of the sky while taking the astronomy laboratory class at UCLA. How exciting would that be to you to have a telescope: however, you live in LA and after opening the present, your happy smile disappeared, for the type of telescope might not totally satisfy your needs, why? why not?

Although, uncomfortable you called your friend to explain.........(fill in the blank)

(keep in mind your friend does not know neither about EM waves, nor types of telescopes; moreover, you don't want to hurt his/her feelings)

Answer 1

Since I am at LA and it is a densely populated place so the visibility of the sky is less and there is a huge amount of dust particles in the Earth's atmosphere which mostly absorbed the light coming from the celestial objects. The infrared telescope measures only a range of wavelengths known as Infrared which is mostly absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. So, it is difficult to observe the sky using the infrared telescope but it is possible if I cooled the telescope using cryogenic material and use some sophisticated detectors but this all costs a huge sum of money and technology. So, it is impractical to have an infrared telescope to observe sky living at LA.