The Unprecedented Impact of the Telescope

The Unprecedented Impact of the Telescope The telescope has had a significant impact on everything related to astronomy and it has changed the world forever. There have been thousands of discoveries made using numerous types of telescopes, and it has enabled us to do things that would have never been possible without it. The telescope has allowed us to see with our own eyes what has always been outside of our world, but there is still much more to be discovered. People have always been intrigued with the night sky, and it was made much easier when Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle grinder, was experimenting with mirrors and invented the telescope (Dolan 21). Galileo Galilei caught on with the idea of refracting mirrors and published his findings in The Starry Messenger in March 1610 (MacLachlan 45). When his teachings taught that the moon’s surface had mountains and valleys, implying that the moon was not a perfect sphere, it stirred things up and started a domino effect of discoveries to be made about the sky for hundreds of years to come. Galileo Galilei was not planning to change the view of the universe like he did, and he had no idea that what he discovered would spark such a change in thinking. When he first pointed his homemade telescope to the sky in the winter of 1609, he was amazed by what the night sky really looked like (Maran 30). The telescope was the most significant invention of the 17th century because it proved the Heliocentric Theory, it has given us information about all of the planets, and it has changed our look at astronomy. In the 1600’s, the Roman Catholic Church had most of the influence on Europeans. Up to that time, most people believed in the Geocentric Theory, an Earth-centered theory used by
Ptolemy. This theory stated that the Earth is the center of the universe and that all planets travel in circular orbits around it called epicycles (Dolan 15). Because the Church believed this theory as absolute truth, the majority

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