Still, even Galileo recognized the ground-based uses of telescopes. After building his first telescopes, Galileo demonstrated the new instrument to the Venetian Senate, including military leaders.

From the time Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609, until the dawn of the space age on October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the world's first ...

Galileo’s telescope (right) uses lenses to magnify about 21 times but gives very restricted views so that he was able to see only about a third of the Moon at once. SSPL via Getty Images ...

At the dawn of the 17th Century, Galileo Galilei began the first major search of the night sky (as well as the Sun!) using a new Dutch invention — the telescope.

Galileo Galilei was a ground-breaking astronomer who discovered, among other things, several of Jupiter’s moons. To explore the skies, he relied on a telescopes that magnified objects with ...

“Galileo’s Telescope” begins in 1608 in the Netherlands, with Hans Lipperhey, a German-born spectacle maker, building a “refracting telescope.” ...

Galileo's device was a 20-magnification instrument that used a convex objective lens and a concave ocular lens. This design was the only real workable telescope of the day.

Four hundred years ago, the great astronomer and thinker Galileo Galilei presented his telescope to a world that had no idea how this piece of technology would change perceptions of man's place in ...

Galileo was not the first scientist to observe the Moon through a telescope. The Englishman Thomas Harriot did so a few months earlier, in the summer of 1609, and Galileo followed suit, building ...