Why would increasing the magnification of the object not necessarily lead to a more satisfying result?

Question

Why would increasing the magnification of the object not necessarily lead to a more satisfying result?

Answer 1

Whatever optical system you use, there is a limit to the resolution it can attain. In other words, because of the nature of lenses, there is a limit to how close things can be and still be seen as different by your optics. If you increase the magnification, you do *not* increase the resolution, so you just end up magnifying a fuzzy image.

For telescopes, you also have to contend with the atmosphere of the earth, which introduces its own fuzziness. As a rule of thumb, an amateur telescope can very seldom go above 300x magnification for this reason (very, very occasionally, 450x). The optics also put a limit of about 50x for each inch in diameter of the objective lens.

Answer 2

You'll probably need to be more specific about what type of object you're trying to magnify, but in general, you can only magnify an image so much before various effects make further magnification useless.  For one thing, if you're looking at a microscope or telescope, there is only so much light available.  Increasing the magnification decreases the amount of light that is available in the image (essentially your are focusing on a smaller area of total light source).  So, without increasing the brightness of your illumination (either by increasing brightness of the lamp on the microscope or increasing the diameter and hence the light gathering power of your telescope), you might well get to the point where you just can't see anything anymore.