Astronomers experienced extreme surprise, when in 1782, they learned that Herschel had applied linear magnifying powers of a thousand, of twelve hundred, of two thousand two hundred, of two thousand six hundred, and even of six thousand times, to a reflecting telescope of seven feet in length.  The Royal Society of London experienced this surprise, and officially requested Herschel to give publicity to the means he had adopted for ascertaining such amounts of magnifying power in his telescopes.  Such was the object of a memoir that he inserted in vol. lxxii. of the Philosophical Transactions; and it dissipated all doubts.  No one will be surprised that magnifying powers, which it would seem ought to have shown the Lunar mountains, as the chain of Mont Blanc is seen from Macon, from Lyons, and even from Geneva, were not easily believed in.  They did not know that Herschel had never used magnifying powers of three thousand, and six thousand times, except in observing brilliant stars; they had not remembered that light reflected by planetary bodies, is too feeble to continue distinct under the same degree of magnifying power as the actual light of the fixed stars does.

Opticians had given up, more from theory than from careful experiments, attempting high magnifying powers, even for reflecting telescopes.  They thought that the image of a small circle cannot be distinct, cannot be sharp at the edges, unless the pencil of rays coming from the object in nearly parallel lines, and which enters the eye after having passed through the eye-piece, be sufficiently broad.  This being once granted, the inference followed, that an image ceases to be well defined, when it does not strike at least two of the nervous filaments of the retina with which that organ is supposed to be overspread.  These gratuitous circumstances, grafted on each other, vanished in presence of Herschel’s observations.  After having put himself on his guard against the effects of diffraction, that is to say, against the scattering that light undergoes when it passes the terminal angles of bodies, the illustrious astronomer proved, in 1786, that objects can be seen well defined by means of pencils of light whose diameter does not equal five tenths of a millimetre.

Herschel looked on the almost unanimous opinion of the double lens eye-piece being preferable to the single lens eye-piece, as a very injurious prejudice in science.  For experience proved to him, notwithstanding all theoretic deductions, that with equal magnifying powers, in reflecting telescopes at least (and this restriction is of some consequence), the images were brighter and better defined with single than with double eye-pieces.  On one occasion, this latter eye-piece would not show him the bands of Saturn, whilst by the aid of a single lens they were perfectly visible.  Herschel said:  “The double eye-piece must be left to amateurs and to those who, for some particular object, require a large field of vision.” (Philosophical Transactions, 1782, pages 94 and 95.)