Telescopes: Galileo to JWST
1608 – ongoing61 items
instrumentsspaceFour centuries of bigger eyes
In 1608 a Dutch spectacle-maker asked for a patent on two lenses in a tube. Within two years Galileo had seen mountains on the Moon and moons around Jupiter. This timeline follows the instruments that came after: lenses as long as a ship’s mast, metal mirrors cast in castle grounds, dishes built into sinkholes, and telescopes sent above the air, from a 3-power spyglass to a 6.5-metre gold mirror a million and a half kilometres away.
Observatories on every continent
The map runs from Middelburg’s patent and Herschel’s garden in Bath to Birr Castle, Mount Wilson and Palomar; from the dishes at Jodrell Bank, Parkes and Arecibo to the Chilean Andes, Mauna Kea, the Karoo in South Africa, a karst valley in Guizhou and the ice at the South Pole. Space telescopes are pinned to their launch pads on the day they left, and nowhere after.
Three calendars in 1609
The telescope was born while Europe disagreed about the date. Holland and Zeeland, like Venice and the rest of Catholic Europe, used the Gregorian calendar, so Lipperhey’s patent and Galileo’s observations are dated New Style. England kept the Julian calendar until 1752, so Thomas Harriot’s drawing of the Moon is dated 26 July 1609, as he wrote it: 5 August in Padua. Newton’s telescopes are Julian too, and his election to the Royal Society is entered as England wrote it, “11 January 1671/2”, with the year starting on Lady Day. Timescrolly places each one on the same axis.
How it is laid out
Periods: the age of the lens, the great reflectors, radio astronomy, the space-telescope era, NASA’s Great Observatories and the segmented giants, with Arecibo’s 57 years as a band of their own.
Threads to filter by:
refractors,reflectors,radio,space telescopes, andplanetsandcosmosfor what they found.
Like buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times. — George Ellery Hale, “The Possibilities of Large Telescopes” (1928)
Items
Lipperhey asks the States General for a patent
Harriot draws the Moon
Galileo turns a twenty-power telescope on the Moon
Galileo sees the moons of Jupiter
Sidereus Nuncius
Kepler’s Dioptrice
Huygens finds Titan
Newton builds a reflecting telescope
Newton’s telescope wins him the Royal Society
Dollond patents the achromatic lens
Herschel finds Uranus from his garden in Bath
First night of Herschel’s forty-foot telescope
Bessel measures the distance to a star
The Leviathan of Parsonstown
The first photograph of a star
Airy’s transit circle
Lick’s great refractor sees first light
Yerkes Observatory is dedicated
First light of the Hooker telescope
Jansky hears the Milky Way
Grote Reber’s backyard dish
First light of the Hale telescope
The 21-centimetre line of hydrogen
Jodrell Bank tracks Sputnik’s rocket
Pigeons in the Holmdel horn
Jocelyn Bell finds the first pulsar
ESO opens La Silla
Parkes holds the Moon in a gale
The Arecibo message
The Soviet six-metre telescope
The Very Large Array is dedicated
Hubble goes up
Hubble’s flawed mirror
The first planets beyond the Solar System
Keck I begins science
First light of the Very Large Telescope
Columbia launches Chandra
Spitzer launches
First light of SALT
The South Pole Telescope opens
Kepler launches
IceCube is finished
ALMA is inaugurated
Gaia launches
First light of FAST
First stone of the Extremely Large Telescope
The first picture of a black hole
Arecibo collapses
Webb launches on Christmas Day
Webb’s first images
Rubin Observatory’s first look