The telescope that Galileo presented to the Doge of Venice, and which
was later lost, consisted of a tube of lead, with what is called a
plano-concave eye-glass and a plano-convex object glass, and had a
magnifying power of three diameters, which made objects look three
times nearer than they actually were, and as a result nine times
larger. The tube was about seventy centimeters long and about
forty-five millimeters in diameter. It was first used in public from
the top of the campanile in the piazza at Venice on August 21, 1609,
and the most distant object that could be seen through it was the
campanile of the church of San Giustina in Padua, about thirty-five
kilometers away.
As soon as Galileo returned to his home in Padua he busied himself
with improving his invention. First he constructed a new telescope,
which as he said “made objects appear more than sixty times larger.”
Soon he had a still better one, which enlarged four hundred times. He
used this to examine the moon, and said that it brought that body “to
a distance of less than three semi-diameters of the earth, thus making
it appear about twenty times nearer and four hundred times larger than
when seen by the unaided eye.” To use the instrument more accurately
he built a support which held it firmly. He had also now learned to
make the lenses adjustable, by fixing the tubes that held them so that
they could be drawn out of, or pushed into the main tube of the
telescope. To see objects not very far distant very clearly he would
push the glasses a little way apart, and to see things very far
distant he drew the glasses together.
But this last telescope did not altogether satisfy him, and so he
built a still larger one. This brought objects more than thirty times
closer and showed them almost a thousand times larger in size. With
this he discovered the moons of Jupiter, and some of the fixed stars,
and added much to what was already known concerning the Milky Way, a
region of the sky which had long been a puzzle to astronomers.
He spent a great part of his time now in his workshop, making and
grinding glasses. They were expensive and very difficult to prepare
properly. Out of more than one hundred that he ground at first he
found only ten that would show him the newly found moons of Jupiter.
The object glasses were the more difficult, for it was this glass
which had to bring to a focus as accurately as possible all the rays
of light that passed into the telescope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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