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It was the first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope, and it contains the results of Galileo's early observations of the imperfect and mountainous Moon, of hundreds of stars not visible to the naked eye in the Milky Way and in certain constellations, and of the Medicean Stars (later Galilean moons) that ...
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei (/ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ oʊ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ /, US also / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l iː oʊ-/; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi]) or mononymously as Galileo, was a Florentine astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath.
Galileo began his telescopic observations in the later part of 1609, and by March 1610 was able to publish a small book, The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), describing some of his discoveries: mountains on the Moon, lesser moons in orbit around Jupiter, and the resolution of what had been thought to be very cloudy masses in the sky (nebulae) into collections of stars too faint to see ...
Whether he knew of Galileo's ideas primarily through Scheiner or whether he read Letters on Sunspots directly is not known, but in his Principles of Philosophy (1644) he refers to "spots which appear on the sun's surface also revolve around it in planes inclined to that of the ecliptic", which appears to indicate at least a knowledge of Galileo ...
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.
During Galileo's 21st orbit, it acquired a three-color, global mosaic of the anti-Jovian hemisphere (the "far" side of Io), its highest resolution observations of Io to date. This mosaic complemented the coverage obtained by Voyager 1 , whose highest resolution observations covered Io's sub-Jovian hemisphere. [ 2 ]
Telescopic observations resulted in the discovery of moons and rings around planets, and new planets, comets and the asteroids; the recognition of planets as other worlds, of Earth as another planet, and stars as other suns; the identification of the Solar System as an entity in itself, and the determination of the distances to some nearby stars.
It is meant to be an inexpensive means by which millions of people can view the same things seen by Galileo Galilei, such as the craters of Earth's Moon, four of Jupiter's moons, and the Pleiades. The small telescope has an aperture of 50 mm (2.0 in) and a relatively long focal length of 500 mm, for a focal ratio of f/10.