A Telescope to the Past as Galileo Visits U.S.
Only two of the dozens of telescopes Galileo built survive. Neither have ever been out of Florence since Galileo’s time. That is, until this week, when Giorgio Strano, curator at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science there, escorted this humble tube to the Franklin Institute.
Scholars do not know when Galileo built this particular telescope, or what he saw with it, but it still has its original optics. A brief audience with the telescope — under the stern gaze of Dr. Strano — gives you an idea of how hard it must have been for Galileo to be Galileo.
Squinting through the eyepiece as the tube lay on a table, hands gloved but careful not to actually touch the telescope, I found the field of view strikingly narrow. Down a tunnel of blackness all the light of the room was compressed into a blurry, fragile dot.
In order to accomplish high magnification on the planets, Galileo had to settle for seeing a very small slice of sky — about half the diameter of a full Moon in the case of this telescope — making it correspondingly difficult to find anything in the sky. Mapping the Moon, for example, would require moving the telescope.
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Scholars do not know when Galileo built this particular telescope, or what he saw with it, but it still has its original optics. A brief audience with the telescope — under the stern gaze of Dr. Strano — gives you an idea of how hard it must have been for Galileo to be Galileo.
Squinting through the eyepiece as the tube lay on a table, hands gloved but careful not to actually touch the telescope, I found the field of view strikingly narrow. Down a tunnel of blackness all the light of the room was compressed into a blurry, fragile dot.
In order to accomplish high magnification on the planets, Galileo had to settle for seeing a very small slice of sky — about half the diameter of a full Moon in the case of this telescope — making it correspondingly difficult to find anything in the sky. Mapping the Moon, for example, would require moving the telescope.