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The engineering required to build a very large refracting telescope would be many times more expensive than an equivalent reflector. With the mirror optics of a reflecting telescope, the telescope can be "folded" so that light passes through the barrel of the telescope three or more times, while a refracting telescope is straight.

Another reason even more important, is that in a refracting telescope the light passes THROUGH the glass lenses, while in a reflector the light bounces off a polished mirror. When light passes through a glass lens, some little bit of the light is absorbed and lost; in a reflector, everything bounces off.

To make this even worse, the lenses for a large diameter refracting telescope would have to be quite thick even at the edges to support their own weight, and the amount of light lost depends on the thickness of the lens.

So reflecting telescopes not only handle the light more efficiently, but are easier to build.
Due to the larger weight involved with a larger telescope, a lens in a large refracting telescope will become distorted and no longer project an image to the proper focal point. With a reflecting telescope, this problem is not as prominent and if it does happen it does not have as big of an impact on the image.

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