Light reflecting off a flat mirror is one thing, but what happens when light reflects off a curved surface? We'll take a look at what happens when light reflects from a spherical mirror, because it turns out that, using reasonable approximations, this analysis is fairly straight-forward. Using the similar triangles ABC and EDC, it can also be seen that the distance from the object to the mirror is the same as the distance from the image to the mirror. What you notice is that the reflected rays diverge from the mirror they must be extended back to find the place where they intersect, and that's where the image is.Īnalyzing this a little further, it's easy to see that the height of the image is the same as the height of the object. Note that the reflected rays obey the law of reflection. The image will be found where the reflected rays intersect. In a ray diagram, rays of light are drawn from the object to the mirror, along with the rays that reflect off the mirror. To figure out where the image of this object is located, a ray diagram can be used. It's relatively straight-forward geometry, all based on similar triangles, but we should review that for a plane mirror.Ĭonsider an object placed a certain distance in front of a mirror, as shown in the diagram. This also implies that an image could not be focused on a screen placed at the location where the image is.ĭealing with light in terms of rays is known as geometrical optics, for good reason: there is a lot of geometry involved.
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