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ARTIST’S IMPRESSION The telescope is astronomy’s miracle worker. It reveals faint stars
OF GALILEO’S FAMOUS
TELESCOPES
With his small, homemade and nebulae and magnifies distant objects. Telescopes take
telescopes, capable of mag-
nifying objects by a factor of
astronomers on a journey to the distant reaches of the Universe,
20, Galileo Galilei made some
of mankind’s most astonish-
ing discoveries. He observed where sparkling galaxies adorn the darkness of the void. But
stars and nebulae and stud-
ied Solar System objects like they also serve as time machines, providing scientists with a
the Sun, the Moon, Saturn,
Jupiter and Venus. Although
he did not invent the instru-
view of the earliest cosmic eras. No other single instrument has
ment, it was Galileo who truly
made the telescope famous. done so much for our view of mankind’s place in time and space.

Astronomy would barely rate as a science without the telescope.

Four hundred years ago the early pioneers began a journey that

led from the chance alignment of two simple lenses to today’s

complex space-based observatories and massive mountaintop

mirrors.

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F our centuries ago a man walked out into the fields near his home in Padua and pointed
his homemade telescope at the Moon, the planets and the stars. Astronomy would
never be the same again. The date was Thursday, 30 November 1609. The man was the
Tuscan physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. He may not have realised it at the time,
but that night he started a scientific revolution of cosmic proportions. To commemorate
Galileo’s first observations of the heavens with a telescope the United Nations and the
International Astronomical Union have declared 2009 to be the International Year of As-
tronomy.

For thousands of years the human eye was the only instrument available to observe the
Universe. The invention of the telescope changed that. Now astronomers assemble giant
mirrors on remote mountaintops to look out through the thinnest layers of the clearest,
stillest atmosphere to catch faint signals from some of the farthest and oldest objects
known. Radio telescopes collect faint chirps and whispers from outer space. Scientists
have even launched telescopes into Earth orbit, high above the distorting effects of our
atmosphere. And the view has been breathtaking.

Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, and its exact origin is still controversial. The oldest
existing documents to mention the telescope attribute its invention to the Dutch spec-
tacle maker, Hans Lipperhey (also known as Lippershey) in the early 17th century. Tinker-
ing away, Lipperhey found that placing a convex lens at one end of a cardboard tube and
a concave lens at the other allowed him to magnify distant objects. The telescope was
born!

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GALILEO DEMONSTRATING
ONE OF HIS TELESCOPES
In August 1609, Galileo
demonstrated the use of his
new telescope as a tool for
observing the stars to the
ruler of Venice, the Doge.
Standing to the right of the
telescope, Galileo can be seen
in the centre of St. Mark’s
square in Venice. Always the
radical inventor, Galileo had
not only revolutionised the
design of the telescope, but
was also the first to realise
that it could be used to study
the heavens rather than just
to magnify objects on Earth.
In the years to come, Galileo’s
observations would lend
credence to the heliocentric
worldview of Nicolaus Coper-
As far as we know, Lipperhey never looked at the stars through his telescope — he be-
nicus, who removed the Earth
lieved that his invention would mainly serve seafarers and soldiers. Lipperhey was from
from its central position in
Middelburg, a large trading city in the fledgling Dutch Republic, then at war with Spain. the Universe.
In October 1608 Lipperhey demonstrated the telescope to Prince Maurits of the Neth-
erlands, who was able to read the time on the church clock in Delft, from a tower in The
Hague eight kilometres away. The new spyglass could reveal enemy ships and troops too
distant to be seen by the unaided eye. A useful invention indeed. However, the Dutch
government did not grant Lipperhey a patent, since other merchants, notably Lipper-
hey’s competitor Zacharias Janssen, also claimed the invention and might actually have
built the first telescope around 1604. The dispute has never been settled. The true origin
of the telescope remains shrouded in mystery.

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