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Y our camera can zoom in to make faraway images look close. Something tiny under a microscope appears huge. Eyeglasses make images sharper and in focus.

To see the sky and beyond? For that we need the telescope.

The First Looker

Kids you can be inventors too! Rumor has it that the first telescope was invented by children. In Holland around the year 1608 two curious Dutch boys were fooling around in Hans Lippershey’s eyeglass shop. Hans really wanted to shoo them out the front door lest they break expensive lenses but they were too busy experimenting to pay him much heed. “Hans look!” they shouted gesticulating wildly “that weather vane looks so close to us!” Hans saw that they were looking through two lenses. He placed a tube around the lenses called it a kijker (Dutch for “looker”) and the telescope was born.

News of this fantastic new “looker” also called a spyglass reached the ears of Italian astronomer physicist mathematician inventor and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galileo built his first telescope in 1609. While those early telescopes only magnified several times Galileo’s were much stronger. By 1610 his 30x telescope (sees things 30 times bigger) led him to discover that the moon isn’t quite as smooth as it looks when viewed with the naked eye but actually full of craters (bowl-shaped depressions). He saw four of Jupiter’s moons. He proved that the planets orbit the sun not the earth. His findings were revolutionary in two senses: they were new and incited arguments. The people of his era refused to believe him. The Catholic Church forbade him from publishing his writings. The Inquisition put him on trial. But he kept on observing studying and secretly writing. Way to go Galileo — never give up!

Telescope Talk

Space is huge — full of planets stars galaxies meteors moons cosmos and more. Unless one is an astronaut traveling the universe in a space shuttle or spaceship space research is done using telescopes. Telescopes use light to magnify images.

All heat produced by the sun travels to the earth in waves called electromagnetic waves. All these different sized waves are known as the electromagnetic spectrum. Light has different wavelengths and astronomers have special telescopes to collect each type of light. There are radio telescopes X-ray telescopes infrared telescopes gamma ray telescopes and ultraviolet telescopes.

Everyday Perks

Billions of dollars are being spent on building telescopes research and studying telescopic images. Lots of secrets of the universe are being uncovered leading to all kinds of scientific studies and theories. There are also lots of practical day-to-day benefits from all that research. Here are some:

CCDs What you don’t have any? You probably do you just don’t know it. CCDs (charge coupled devices) convert the movement of electrical charge into digital value. The concept was developed for astronomy but is now used in most cameras and cell phones. In simple terms it’s what records the picture.