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To demonstrate the falsehood of Scheiner's assertion that the moons of Jupiter were 'wandering stars', unpredictable in their movement, as well as to display his own clear superiority in observation and calculation of celestial movements, Galileo appended a complete set of Ephemerides for the Jovian moons to his third letter.
Because its orbit takes it between the Earth and the Sun, Venus as seen from Earth exhibits visible phases in much the same manner as the Earth's Moon. Galileo Galilei observed the phases of Venus in December 1610, an observation which supported Copernicus's then-contentious heliocentric description of the Solar System.
The first observations of the full planetary phases of Venus were by Galileo at the end of 1610 (though not published until 1613 in the Letters on Sunspots).Using a telescope, Galileo was able to observe Venus going through a full set of phases, something prohibited by the Ptolemaic system that assumed Venus to be a perfect celestial body.
Galileo's sketches of the Moon from Sidereus Nuncius. Sidereus Nuncius contains more than seventy drawings and diagrams of the Moon, certain constellations such as Orion, the Pleiades, and Taurus, and the Medicean Stars of Jupiter. Galileo's text also includes descriptions, explanations, and theories of his observations.
Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was an early user and made prolific discoveries, including the phases of Venus, which definitively disproved the arrangement of spheres in the Ptolemaic system. Galileo also discovered that the Moon was cratered, that the Sun was marked with sunspots, and that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it. [13]
Europa (Jupiter II), the second of the four Galilean moons, is the second closest to Jupiter and the smallest at 3121.6 kilometers in diameter, which is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon. The name comes from a mythical Phoenician noblewoman, Europa , who was courted by Zeus and became the queen of Crete , though the name did not become widely ...
1610 – Galileo Galilei observes the four main moons of Jupiter: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io; [82] sees Saturn's planetary rings (but does not recognize that they are rings), [83] and observes the phases of Venus, [84] disproving the Ptolemaic system though not the geocentric model.
The discovery was made possible by the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands a little more than a year earlier and by Galileo's innovations to improve the magnification of the new instrument. [7] During his observation of Jupiter on the evening of January 7, Galileo spotted two stars to the east of Jupiter and another one to the west. [8]