Today I went on Google to search for something as usual, and saw a new picture, after reading a bit on the internet about it, I discovered this is because of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope. As a Physicist, I am very excited about this occasion, which allowed people all over the world to study the outer space far away from the Earth in greater depth and precision. Before this amazing invention, as far as I'm aware, the astronomers had quite limited means to study extraterrestrial bodies, like pointing at the stars by hand and recording this on a big big ruler.
For example, in the 16th century,
Tycho Brahe built an observatory and founded "precision astronomy" using this method. Nevertheless they discovered a few important scientific facts about comets and recorded a supernovae in 1572.
High resolution image
Although the word telescope is commonly associated with
Galileo Galilei, he was not the inventor of this wonderful device. In fact
Hans Lippershey, also knows as Jan or Hans Lippersheim invented it in 1608. But it was Galileo who build his own telescope in 1609 and made improvements to the telescope, used it for practical and scientific observations.
Nowadays, after centuries of research and development, telescopes are far more sophisticated pieces of equipment, ranging from lens/mirror telescopes to radio/high energy particle telescopes, positioned on the Earth and in space, some optical telescopes from
5 to 11 metres in size or
26m dish for radio telescopes, some costing millions of dollars. And of course most of you have heard of the
Hubble telescope that costed 2.5 billion dollars to construct.
Most of the
beautiful images (although most of them have enhanced colours) we see today were achieved with telescopes, and allowed the humanity to peek into the furthest corners of the universe, millions of light years away from us, revolutionizing the way we see the world around us.
