Question: how are most telescopes different?

There are a lot of different types of telescopes, from the small ones you can set up in your backyard to the large dishes tens of meters across. They all work basically the same way your eye does: they collect light. Larger telescopes collect more light, and some telescopes are designed to see types of light that our eyes can’t (like infrared light or even radio waves). Other differences in telescopes used by professional astronomers involve the way that the information from the light is recorded. For example, sometimes we want to take a picture of the sky, and other times we want to take the light and spread it out into different colors so we can learn what types of chemicals make up the stars that we are seeing. Some telescopes can even do both at the same time!