For centuries, mankind has always pondered upon the wonders that is beyond our planet, the Earth. The invention of the telescope has vastly improved our view of the skies, sharpening our perception of the universe and penetrating ever deeper, to the furthest edges of time and space. The underlying roots to the invention of the telescope is vague and thought to have started around during the 13th century. An accidental discovery made by a glassmaker during this era, resulted in the development and defined the early beginnnings of spectacles. The glassmaker discovered the magnifying effect of glass when objects glanced through a glass disk appeared clearer and larger in size. It was not until the 17th century which convex lenses were utilised together to create what we now call the “telescope”.
The actual, true inventor of the telescope will never be known,however, a dutch spectacle maker by the name of Hans Lippershey was the first person to patent. The patent was denied as there were disputes over who was the foremost and earliest inventor of the telescope. The underlying reasoning laid upon the claims of other merchants who also declared themselves to have conceived the invention, whom one of which is Lippershey’s competitor, Zacharias Jansen. Hans figured that if he combined a convex and a concave lens with one another, it would greatly magnify the object of interest when observed through the newly merged lens. During this time the telescope was not used to observe the stars but rather as a war tool by the navy. The discovery and creation of the telescope spread like wildfire which led a physicist and astronomer named Galileo Galilei to construct the device in 1609. Galileo saw the potential of the telescope which led to th...
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...it the Sun. Astronomer’s quest for cosmic understanding and their telescopic exploration of the universe in only 400 years old and in conclusion there is still a long way to go.
Works Cited
http://www.universetoday.com/23901/space-telescope-of-the-future-sim/
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/hale.html
http://g9mp2009.asb-wiki.wikispaces.net/Ana+Sofia+Einspanier
http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/instruments/telescope.html
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/history-of-the-telescope-draft.ars/
http://www.universetoday.com/18210/telescope-history/
http://slas.us/docs/TELESCOPE.PDF
http://www.darganov.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/history-of-the-telescope.pdf
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~meech/mp/A_Brief_History.pdf
http://www.cmnh.org/site/Files/AtMuseum/InTheSky/Telescopes.pdf
William’s father was an army musician. Following his father’s profession, he played for the Hanoverian Guards. When the French took over Hanover in 1757, he escaped to England where he made a living by copying music. He started to improvise by starting to teach music, and finally, he became a composer. In 1766, he was appointed organist of the Chapel of Beth. His curiosities with music lead him to read Robert Smith’s Harmonics. After finding Smith’s book interesting, he read A Complete System of Opticks, which introduced him to telescope construction. Herschel told himself that he wasn’t going to study the Sun and Moon like every other astronomer did. He instead, thought of trying to look for different celestial bodies. The problem was he would need massive lens for this job, much more then he could afford for a reasonable price, so he instead decided to carve them himself. They were ground from metal disks of copper, tin, and antimony in various proportions. His attempts seemed to be useless though, in h...
“Eventually, we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows and search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” is a quote about Hubble’s views on discovery and exploration of the universe (Hubble, 1936). Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri, USA on November 29 1889 but later moved to Chicago with his family, where he completed his post secondary education and obtained an undergraduate degree in mathematics and astronomy, from the University of Chicago. To fulfill his father’s wish, Hubble being a dutiful son, later went on to study law at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Upon obtaining his law degree, Hubble successfully opened and operated a small practice back in the US. Seeing as law was never a passion of Hubble’s, as he stated, “It was astronomy that mattered” and knowing his heart lied elsewhere, Hubble once again went back to the University of Chicago to obtain his doctorate in astronomy (Mayall, 1970). Earlier in his life, as having broken the state record in high jump, Hubble was better known for his athletic prowess. Hubble today is lauded as a pioneer and a visionary, who went beyond the confines of his time to seek more and see farther out into the universe, on route making major discoveries and contributions into the vast field of astronomy.
After hearing of this great invention, Galileo was quick to develop himself a telescope; providing the means to make revolutionary discoveries about the universe, that accosted orthodox doctrine of the time. In 1609, Galileo first looked up to the heavens with his telescope. In doing so, he discovered Venus’ phases, and some of Jupiter’s moons, which are now named the Galilean moons. The discovery of Venus’ phases showed that Venus orbited the sun, and the discovery of the moons of Jupiter proved not everything orbited the Earth; these were two crucial components of the Copernican theory. The Copernican theory stated that the solar system was heliocentric, which defied Aristotle’s and the church’s doctrine of the geocentric theory. Later, Galileo discovered sunspots, further abnegating Aristotle’s long held doctrine, which stated the sun was perfect. The Catholic Church
The Sun is a huge, bright sphere that is mostly made up of gas that is about 5 billion years old. The Sun is the closest to the Earth, it is 145 million km distant (this distance is called an Astronomical Unit). The next closest star is 300,000 times further away. There are probably millions of similar stars in the Milky Way galaxy (and even more galaxies in the Universe), but the Sun is the most important to us because it supports life on Earth.
In 1604, Johannes Kepler published the book Astronomiae Pars Optica. The book has been considered by many to be the basis of all modern optics. In his research, Kepler discovered many of the fundamental principles of optics (Molecular Expressions). He discovered how the eye bends light in order to form an image. He was one of the first people to use a pinhole camera to study how images are formed, and how the camera causes the image to form upside-down. He further discussed inverted images in another book, Dioptrice (Kepler). He also discussed how magnification worked, figuring out how telescopes work. Sadly, Johannes Kepler died in 1630. However, his writings on optics laid the foundation for all the work that would come after him.
In 1610 he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe
As the Hubble telescope’s life comes to a historic end, we look back at all it has done for the scientific community. The Hubble has helped scientists make many new discoveries about our universe. Galileo Galilei and Edwin Hubble were huge contributes to the astronomical community, therefore a major help in transforming the first telescope into something as amazing as the Hubble. The first telescope was perfected by Galileo in 1609, and around four hundred years later the Hubble was launched into space. Since then the Hubble has shown scientists many new discoveries about space that they would have never been able to figure out without the Hubble’s help. Since April 1990 the Hubble telescope has been greatly appreciated by the scientific community because of everything it has done. However, the Hubble has faced many problems along its way as well.
The principle behind the refractive telescopes is the use of two glass lenses (objective lens and eyepiece lens) to gather and bend parallel light rays in a certain way so that the image fits the size of the eye's pupil. Light rays is gather through the opening of the telescope called the aperture and passes through the objective lens and refracts onto a single point called the focal point. From there the light rays continue the same direction until it hits the eyepiece lens which also refract the light back into parallel rays. During the process, the image that enters our eyes is actually reverse of the original image and magnified because the size in which we preceive the image.
Giakoumidis, N., et al. "Developing a Telescope Simulator towards a Global Autonomous Robotic Telescope Network." Publications de l 'Observatoire Astronomique de Beograd 92 (2013):
Thanks to his studies, especially after the translation of Kitâb al-Manâzir (The Book of Optics), many scholars and scientists were inspired. Later European scholars were able take what he had discovered and further our knowledge about cameras and optics in general. Alhazen’s creation of the pinhole camera is the reason why cameras and other important inventions were created, such as eye-glasses, magnifying glasses and telescopes were created, as scholars and scientists knew how images are reflected in our eyes. He especially influenced Isaac Ne...
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
There is a long history of astronomy in science fiction. Some of the earliest can be seen with the Greeks, with their tales of gods representing the parts of the universe they could see. Other cultures began writings of men going beyond the limits of the atmosphere as early a...
One thing us as humans have never been able to fully understand is astronomy. Always having an unexplained mystery, astronomy also has served as a way to keep time and predict the future. The word “astronomy” is defined as the study of heavenly bodies, meaning anything in the sky such as stars, galaxies, comets, planets, nebulae, and so on. Many people, if not everyone, is amazed by the night sky on a clear, moonless night.
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