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).
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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. In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at the heavens using a telescope of his making.
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