*What, made for a Grand Duke, eh? Wow, fancy.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/08/galileo_anniversary/
Astronomers are celebrating 400 years since Galileo made his famous observations, which were fundamental in proving the heliocentric hypothesis, by pointing a replica of one of his original telescopes at the heavens to recreate his original stargaze.
In 1609, Galileo critically discovered four satellites orbiting
Jupiter, which removed "major doubt about the heliocentric model -
namely that the Earth appeared at the centre of things because only it had a satellite", as Physics World puts it.
Galileo's contribution to science was made possible by the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands in 1608, which he improved for use as an astronomical instrument. Now, scientists from the Institute and
Museum of the History of Science and the Arcetri Observatory, both in
Florence, have built a replica of one of his 'scopes and are "using it to generate the images that, to the best of their estimations, Galileo himself would have seen".
In fact, the telescope is not a replica of the instrument used to make the historic observations which appeared in 1610 in the Sidereus Nuncius
(“Starry Messenger”), since only one lens survives. Rather, it's an
"exact replica of the device that Galileo gave to his patron the Grand
Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II, in about 1610" - a 93cm-long device boasting two lenses and a magnification factor of around 20.
