THE 12 BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGHS IN SPACE TECHNOLOGY By Allan Morey STORY LIBRARY
1 Bringing the Night Sky Closer with Telescopes For thousands of years people looked up in amazement at the night sky They could see the moon and stars Even some planets were 44 visible But these objects were too far away to study In the early 1600s Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey built one of the first telescopes He used two glass lenses One was concave or curved inward The other was convex or curved outward Lippershey put the lenses in a tube That way he could look through both at the same time They made objects appear up to three times closer Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei heard of this new invention He built a telescope that magnified objects up to nine times He saw mountains and craters on the moon He noticed sunspots on the sun and made many other discoveries The first telescopes were refracting telescopes Their lenses bent and focused light to magnify objects But
Isaac Newton’s first reflecting telescope in the 1600s it was difficult to make good quality glass lenses Objects seen through early telescopes were often fuzzy In 1668 English scientist Isaac Newton built a reflecting telescope It used polished mirrors instead of glass lenses Light shined into the telescope and onto a concave mirror That light was then focused onto a smaller mirror The second mirror directed the light to an eyepiece Newton’s telescope magnified objects up to 35 times It made studying objects in the night sky much easier THINK ABOUT IT Hans Lippershey is credited with inventing the telescope But Galileo improved the telescope and made it more useful Who do you think deserves more credit for his work and why 1609 Year when Galileo built his first telescope Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is credited with inventing the telescope Refracting telescopes use lenses to bend light and magnify faraway objects Reflecting telescopes use mirrors to focus light and magnify faraway objects 55
