Concave Mirrors, Principal Ray Diagram

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What about concave mirrors? Can they produce images, too? This interactive animation shows that indeed, a concave mirror does produce an image of an object in front of it.

Move the object, the candle, with your mouse to explore how the location and the size of the image change with the position of the object. Like in the interactive animation for the convex mirror, you can turn on and off the three principal rays to study how the image is constructed.

Try to answer the following questions: for what position of the object is the image virtual (i.e., located behind the mirror)? Is this virtual image upright or inverted? Is it smaller or larger than the object?

Can you find locations of the object for which the image appears at the same side of the mirror? In this case, the reflected rays actually come together in the image, so this is a real image. Is the real image upright or inverted? Larger or smaller than the object?

If you cannot answer all of these questions right away, continue with the next slides, and come back to this interactive animation after you have worked through the two video problems.

 

 

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If the object is located between C and F of a concave mirror, the image
 
 
 
 
  

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If a concave mirror produces a virtual image, we know that