William Herschel (1706-1761) tried to correct for this distortion by combining two separate lenses, but it was still difficult to achieve good resolution for far distant light sources. Reflector telescopes, invented by Isaac Newton in 1668, used a single concave mirror rather than a convex lens. The concave mirror gathered more light than a lens, reflecting it onto a flat mirror at the end of the telescope for viewing. A smaller mirror could provide greater magnification and a larger field of view than a convex lens. Newton's first mirror was 1.3 inches in diameter; such mirrors were rarely more than 3 inches
Compound refractive lens Compound refractive lens A Compound refractive lens (CRL) is a series of individual lenses arranged in a linear array in order to achieve focusing of X-rays in the energy range of 5-40 keV. They are an alternative to the KB mirror. For all materials the refractive index for X-rays is close to 1, hence a single conventional lens for X-rays has an extremely long focal length (for practical lens sizes). In addition, X-rays attenuate as they pass through a material so that conventional lenses for X-rays have long been considered impractical. The CRL gets its reasonably short focal length, on