400 years

Sarah bought a 15 dollar telescope and it’s been a blast to use. It was made for the International Year of Astronomy as a low-cost, high quality telescope to help celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first astronomical observations. Apparently she ordered it a while ago but it was sent to our old address, so I’m glad the present occupant contacted us. It came in a box all disassembled… and I don’t mean that a few parts weren’t attached. The actual lenses had to be sandwiched together and inserted. The focusing tube and main optical tube had be snapped together too. It was very interesting to literally put a telescope together, all the lenses inside are actually composite lenses, and it was fun lining them all up. The lens up in front is 2 inches wide and not bad at all for astronomical viewing. The eyepieces had smaller lenses that were more complicated to set up. There were two eyepiece types, one that simulated Galileo’s true telescope and one that was a little “better”.
The hardest part of using it is focusing it. It has a focusing tube that is held in place by a friction collar to the optical tube. You have to literally move it in and out to get the right focus, so no fine adjustment knob. I would apply force and get nothing until the whole thing shifted an abrupt half an inch ruining the image and hitting my eye. Ouch. I got better at it and eventually got it pretty sharp. Now I use a spin technique to get fine adjustments. Also, the image goes through 3 lens pairings so all the cues are reversed. That is surprisingly annoying to deal with.
So we put it on Sarah’s fancy tripod and started looking at stuff. It was great! We saw the 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter to start off with. Jupiter is out nice a bright in the southwestern sky so it was our first destination. The orb of Jupiter itself was way bigger than I thought it would be. I started thinking, hey this a pretty good telescope! There was no denying it, Jupiter is a planet. Last night however I went out a little longer, after my eyes adapted and I even saw one band of Jupiter! Of course the little moons had moved too, all strung out fireflies. I saw the faint haze of Orion’s Nebula and the moon looked absolutely amazing. I am inspired.
Viewing became even more difficult when I started using Galileo’s eyepiece. The viewing cues are correct but the field of view is pencil thin. It was humbling to see first hand what he went through. It must have been frustrating, not to mention he built his own telescope from vague reports of the original one built a year earlier… he even had to grind his own lenses. It is amazing to think this little instrument changed the world 400 years ago. In just that next year in 1610 Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, The Starry Messenger. He wrote about the phases of Venus, Jupiter’s moons and the mountain and crater shadows on the moon. He is accredited to be the father of modern science, something I think is so embedded in us we take it for granted. He was the first to differentiate science from philosophy and religion through 2 things. First, science and essentially everything in “the real world” can be modeled through mathematics that make predictions about future behavior. These models then are verified through experiment and can be revised to fit the experiments. This change in thinking “revolutionized” (hah) the world forever and I am glad I live AFTER that revolution. I hope this remains a time of reason.