Traditional optical telescopes are only as powerful as the size of their lenses. With improving technology mirrors have grown bigger and bigger, providing astronomer with more and more powerful telescopes, the next jump was to array lots of small mirrors to act as a one powerful one, but all of these advances relied upon mirrors to curve the light. The next truly astronomical leap was to substitute the huge primary mirrors with a new type of lens, the effect of bending space.

            When driver coil material was starting to be used to propel ships with spatial curvature, astronomers long before started to use this material to curve light very precisely, and they found that exceptionally good quality fields could be created kilometres wide providing unprecedented light collecting power.

            These kind of telescopes rely on very finely machined blocks of Driver Core Material (DCM), which could produce exceedingly fine fields, though this technology seems ridiculously far fetched in these early days, astronomers were actually running telescopes far more complicated back on the ground, with mirrors that compensated for atmospheric turbulence.

            These spatial distorting telescopes were strictly space application, Earth’s own gravitational field was simply to strong to produce useful spatial lenses, though this was not a major problem as the era before had opened spaceflight as never before meaning that rather having to compromise a telescopes size due to the launch vehicle, it was simply easier to create the whole structure in space.

            At the centre of the generated curvature is the DCM field generator, and although this blocks the lightpath somewhat, it would be far smaller that the secondary mirror obstruction that a similar sized Newtonian would generate with a primary mirror a few kilometres wide.

            A partial problem was actually how much light it captured, if a faint 20^th magnitude star was in the same image as the faintest echo of a galaxy it would overwhelm the instrument completely, for this reason special light cut out filters selectively reduced bright point sources before the image is projected onto sensor, with over bright sources detected by the sensor these too could be selectively blocked out until the faintest objects remained.

            In federation times all the large scientific telescopes are of this type, and most large ships carry simpler and more compact devices, that are still highly effective, and consume much less ship space than similar solid state devices, the compromise is that ship can not project the telescopes lens if using spatial field propulsion as this disrupts the lens.