One of the biggest myths circling telescopes in general is that their primary aim is to magnify objects, making them larger than they seem to the naked eye. While magnification does come in handy for a number of targets and is indeed something that a telescope always does to some extent, it is far from being the main aim of a telescope.

Indeed, as described for the James Webb space telescope, the main issue with most cosmic targets is that their far-away distance makes them extremely faint to see. Take the Andromeda galaxy as an example – the nearest large galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way. At a distance of around 2.5 million light years, the Andromeda galaxy tends to be too faint to observe well with the naked eye, except perhaps for its brighter core region from very dark sky sites.

It is actually massive in the sky, covering the diameter of six adjacent full moons, meaning that excessive magnification would simply show a smaller region of the entire galaxy. Indeed, several cosmic objects similarly cover extensive areas of the sky. The main point of a telescope is therefore not to magnify, but to make such faint targets brighter by collecting as much light as possible per unit time.