Making the far near The invention that set the stage for the ... "objective" lens—the convex lens at the far end of the telescope—Galileo ground a lens larger than he needed, for example.

The investigation of light and optical properties stretches back centuries, at least to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians. In fact, even artificial lenses date back to as early as ...

3 min read The Hubble Space Telescope was designed to free astronomers of a limitation that has plagued them since the days of Galileo—Earth's atmosphere. Shifting air pockets in the atmosphere ...

Galileo was part of the Renaissance, the centuries-long ferment accelerated and intensified by the invention of printing ... And he succeeded in making a telescope of the sort familiar to everyone ...