Lighthouses are far more than tall towers with bright bulbs, they are precision optical systems designed to push light across the horizon. This breaks down how Fresnel lenses concentrate beams, why ...

If you are a Hackaday reader, you probably know what a Fresnel lens is. You find them in everything from overhead projectors to VR headsets. While it seems commonplace now, the Fresnel lens was an ...

John Hill likens the first-order Fresnel lens in the lighthouse at Naval Air Station Pensacola to a fabergé egg. "They aren't made anymore. It is one of only 10 left in the U.S. There is no putting a ...

Lenses are used to bend and focus light. Normal lenses rely on their curved shape to achieve this effect, but physicists have made a flat lens of only three atoms thick which relies on quantum effects ...

Fresnel lenses are all around us, but this vase puts the commonplace technology to work in an entirely new way. Borrowed From Old Lighthouses, A Method For Super-Powerful Solar Power With the help of ...

Fresnel lenses consist of a flat surface with interspaced, concentric steps whereby each step corresponds to the surface of a conventional lens. Each step thereby acts as a refractive surface, much ...