Whats the magnification of the Gemini Telescopes?
In good conditions, the Gemini telescopes can magnify things about 2000 times. But this isn’t really the right question to ask. You could easily build even a lousy telescope with a similar magnification, and many retail stores sell telescopes just like this. But these telescopes just magnify a small blurry picture into a bigger blurry shaky picture: you don’t see anything new. What really matters is how much detail you can see in the pictures taken by a telescope. With the human eye, if your eyesight is good you can make out details as small as 0.03 degrees (120 arc-seconds). A good pair of binoculars will drop this to around 12 arc-seconds. A good amateur telescope will do much better (though many telescope sold in non-specialist shops don’t): you’ll usually be limited not by the telescope but by blurring in the atmosphere, to around 1-2 arcsec. Gemini gets around 0.5 arcsec regularly, and with adaptive optics can get images as sharp as 0.05 arcsec.
