Laden with honors he returned to Padua and settled down to the hard
work of development, grinding many lenses with his own hands and
finally producing the instrument magnifying some 32 times, with which
he began the notable succession of discoveries that laid the foundation
of observational astronomy. This with another of similar dimensions is
still preserved at the Galileo Museum in Florence, and is shown in the
Frontispiece. The larger instrument is forty-nine inches long and an
inch and three quarters aperture, the smaller about thirty-seven inches
long and of an inch and five-eighths aperture. The tubes are of paper,
the glasses still remain, and these are in fact the first astronomical
telescopes.
Galileo made in Padua, and after his return to Florence in the autumn
of 1610, many telescopes which found their way over Europe, but quite
certainly none of power equalling or exceeding these.
In this connection John Greaves, later Savilian Professor of Astronomy
at Oxford, writing from Sienna in 1639, says: “Galileus never made but
two good glasses, and those were of old Venice glass.” In these best
telescopes, however, the great Florentine had clearly accomplished a
most workmanlike feat. He had brought the focus of his eye lens down to
that usual in modern opera glasses, and has pushed his power about to
the limit for simple lenses thus combined.
The lack of clear and homogeneous glass, the great difficulty
of forming true tools, want of suitable commercial abrasives,
impossibility of buying sheet metals or tubing (except lead), and
default of now familiar methods of centering and testing lenses, made
the production of respectably good instruments a task the difficulty of
which it is hard now to appreciate.
The services of Galileo to the art were of such profound importance,
that his form of instrument may well bear his name, even though his
eyes were not the first that had looked through it. Such, too, was the
judgment of his contemporaries, and it was by the act of his colleagues
in the renowned Acaddemia dei Lincei, through the learned Damiscianus,
that the name “Telescope” was devised and has been handed down to us.
A serious fault of the Galilean telescope was its very small field of
view when of any considerable power. Galileo’s largest instrument had
a field of but 7′15″, less than one quarter the moon’s diameter. The
general reason is plain if one follows the rays through the lenses as
in Fig. 4 where _AB_ is the distant object, _o_ the objective, _e_ the
eye lens, _ab_ the real image in the absence of _e_, and _a′b′_ the
virtual magnified image due to _e_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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