Telescope construction was now to fall into more skillful hands. Shortly after 1650 Christian Huygens (1629-1695), and his accomplished brother Constantine awakened to a keen interest in astronomy and devised new and excellent methods of forming accurate tools and of grinding and polishing lenses. [Illustration: FIG. 9.—The first Periscope.] By 1655 they had completed an instrument of 12 feet focus with which the study of Saturn was begun, Titan the chief satellite discovered, and the ring recognized. Pushing further, they constructed a telescope of 23 feet focal length and 2⅓ inches aperture, with which four years later Christian Huygens finally solved the mystery of Saturn’s ring. Evidently this glass, which bore a power of 100, was of good defining quality, as attested by a sketch of Mars late in 1695 showing plainly Syrtis Major, from observation of which Huygens determined the rotation period to be about 24 hours. The Huygens brothers were seemingly the first fully to grasp the advantage of very long focus in cutting down the aberrations, the aperture being kept moderate. Their usual proportions were about as indicated above, the aperture being kept somewhere nearly as the square root of the focus in case of the larger glasses. In the next two decades the focal length of telescopes was pushed by all hands to desperate extremes. The Huygens brothers extended themselves to glasses up to 210 feet focus and built many shorter ones, a famous example of which, of 6 inches aperture and 123 feet focal length, presented to the Royal Society, is still in its possession. Auzout produced even longer telescopes, and Divini and Campani, in Rome, of whom the last named made Cassini’s telescopes for the Observatory of Paris, were not far behind. The English makers were similarly busy, and Hevelius in Danzig was keeping up the record. [Illustration: FIG. 10.—Christian Huygens.] Clearly these enormously long telescopes could not well be mounted in tubes and the users were driven to aerial mountings, in which the objective was at the upper end of a spar or girder and the eye piece at the lower. Figure 11 shows an actual construction by Hevelius for an objective of 150 feet focal length. In this case the main support was a T beam of wooden planks well braced together. Additional stiffness was given by light wooden diaphragms at short intervals with apertures of about 8 inches next to the objective, and gradually increasing downwards. The whole was lined up by equalizing tackle in the vertical plane, and spreaders with other tackle at the joints of the 40foot sections of the main beam. The mast which supported the whole was nearly 90 feet high.