Reflection: Optics

I learned many things about optics during this unit. I learned how optics can help people with vision problems such as giving a farsighted glasses with convex lenses to fix their vision and a near sighted person concave lenses to adjust their vision. I also learned a lot about how certain mirrors work and why it is they create certain reflections. I had seen many kinds of mirrors and wondered why some produced an exact reflection of the object and others a smaller or larger image of the object. I learned what it takes for convex or concave mirrors to create real, virtual, upright, inverted, larger or smaller images.


I found this unit it to be one of the most difficult until I started understanding it better. What I had difficulty in was labeling my ray tracings. It took me a while to figure out that concave and convex create real images if the rays intersect in front of the mirror and virtual images if the rays intersect behind the mirror. But then, when we learned about convex and concave lenses and how the images were created were opposite from the ones created from the mirrors. If the image created by the lens was located behind it, the image would be real but if the image were to appear in front of it, the image would then be virtual. This threw me off a bit but I was quickly able to recover.

My area of strength was using the new equations. I am usually able to adjust myself to the new equations of each unit and memorize when I have to use certain ones and for what. The only area I struggled in was the ray tracing. Eventually I understood how to do them but what would then stump me would be labeling them. Only difficulty I had with that was determining whether the image was real or virtual. In the end I was able to understand everything fairly well.