![]() Within a few years, he began grinding his own lenses and changing his arrays. His first versions only improved the view to the eighth power, but Galileo’s telescope steadily improved. Galileo’s telescope was similar to how a pair of opera glasses work – a simple arrangement of glass lenses to magnify objects. Galileo Galilei showing the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope by Giuseppe Bertini (1858). ![]() When Galileo heard of this new optical instrument he set about engineering and making improved versions, with higher magnification. But Galileo Galilei’s friends convinced his own government to wait – sure that he could improve the design. Much like our modern times, the manufacturers were quickly trying to corner the market with their invention. These primitive telescopes only magnified the view a few times over. These low power telescopes were likely made by almost all advanced opticians, but the very first was credited to Hans Lippershey of Holland. In the late summer of 1608, a new invention was all the rage in Europe – the spyglass. Naturally, Galileo’s telescope had some historical antecedents. It took a lot of work and different arrangements to get the lens the proper sizes and distances apart, but Galileo’s telescope remained the most powerful and accurately built for a great many years. If moved at a distance, it appeared larger than the object. He also knew that if he used a concave lens, the object would appear on the same side of the lens where the object was located. Galileo knew that light from an object placed at a distance from a convex lens created an identical image on the opposite side of the lens. In Galileo’s telescope the objective lens was convex and the eye lens was concave (today’s telescopes make use of two convex lenses). Galileo had no diagrams to work from, and instead relied on his own system of trial and error to achieve the proper placement of the lenses. As you can see from this diagram below, which is taken from Galileo’s own work – Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”) – it was a simple arrangement of lenses that first began with optician’s glass fixed to either end of a hollow cylinder.ĭiagram of Galileo’s refractor telescope, taken from Sidereus Nuncius (1610). Galileo’s telescope was the prototype of the modern day refractor telescope. How exactly was it an improvement on then-current designs? What exactly did he see with it when he looked up at the night sky? And what has become of it today? Luckily, all of these are questions we are able to answer. Centuries later, Galileo’s is still held in such high esteem not only for the groundbreaking research he conducted, but because of his immense ingenuity in developing his own research tools.Īnd at the center of it all is Galileo’s famous telescope, which still inspires curiosity centuries later. And what he saw would forever revolutionize the field of astronomy, our understanding of the Universe, and our place in it. We know that God made the universe just by speaking.In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at the heavens using a telescope of his making. How old is it? How big is it? Where did it come from? It tries to answer questions about the universe. It tells us when stars come to life or die. Why not send a telescope to space? By 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope had launched into orbit. In the 1940s, an astronomer named Lyman Spitzer made a suggestion. Stars that appear to be twinkling in the sky are actually just getting “bent” by the atmosphere. Looking at the stars through the atmosphere is like looking at something through a glass of water. When they observed from the ground, Earth’s atmosphere got in the way. In the coming years, scientists realized something else. They could also find out what it was made of. Suddenly, astronomers could find out more than a star’s location. The patterns the colors make shows a star’s elements. The spectroscope divides starlight into its different colors. In the 19th century, the spectroscope arrived on the scene. Thanks to the telescope, they could observe the facts for themselves.Īs history marched on, telescopes grew stronger. Suddenly, people didn’t get to decide what the universe was like. It also changed the way people thought about science. For the first time, people began to see that the Earth revolved around the sun. Galileo’s telescope changed people’s minds about how the universe worked. (He glimpsed just a few craters on the moon and the Milky Way.) But for his time, the discovery was extraordinary! What Galileo first saw might not sound impressive to us. But astronomy really changed when an Italian instrument-maker named Galileo pointed his telescope toward the sky. ![]() People in Europe wore glasses, used binoculars, and even had telescopes. In 1609, the optic lens had already been invented.
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