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Galileo Galilei: Telescopes
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Galileo Galilei (February 15, 1564 – January 8, 1642) was an Italian physicist, astronomer, astrologer, and philosopher who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first and second laws of motion, and effective support for Copernicanism. He has been referred to as the "father of modern astronomy", as the "father of modern physics", and as the "father of science". Galileo's career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler.
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Galileo Galilei was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. He is probably the most famous of all Renaissance scientists, and he is often considered the founder of modern astronomy. The reason for this was his perfection of the refracting telescope, which was invented in Holland in the very early 1600s. Galileo heard of it, and built a home-made model in 1609.
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Probably the most significent contribution that Galileo Galilei made to science was the discovery of the four satellites around Jupiter that are now named in his honor. Galileo first observed the moons of Jupiter on January 7, 1610 through a homemade telescope. He originally thought he saw three stars near Jupiter, strung out in a line through the planet. The next evening, these stars seemed to have moved the wrong way, which caught his attention. Galileo continued to observe the stars and Jupiter for the next week. On January 13, a fourth star appeared.
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Galileo Galilei was referred to, in his day, as the father of modern astronomy, physics and science by various academics. One misconception that has lasted many years is that Galileo Galilei invented the telescope, which he did not. Galileo made improvements to the telescope and was one of the first to improve it enough to use it to observe the sky.
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In Venice on a holiday in 1609, Galileo Galilei heard rumors that a Dutch spectacle-maker had invented a device that made distant objects seem near at hand (at first called the spyglass and later renamed the telescope). A patent had been requested, but not yet granted, and the methods were being kept secret, since it was obviously of tremendous military value for Holland.
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Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots. He ... reinterpreted a sunspot observation from the time of Charlemagne, which formerly had been attributed (impossibly) to a transit of Mercury. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the unchanging perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for both the geocentric system and that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots, and in their interpretation, led Galileo to a long and bitter feud with the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there is little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes. Scheiner quickly adopted Kepler's 1615 proposal of the modern telescope design, which gave larger magnification at the cost of inverted images; Galileo apparently never changed to Kepler's design.
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