See how telescopes capture the cosmos. ExtremeTech explains the science behind lenses and space exploration. Start exploring ...

Astronomers have constructed telescopes of every kind - massive observatories designed to pick up faint traces of light ...

Sir Isaac Newton once wrote, in what must be one of the most oft-quoted lines in the history of science, "If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." Well, any of us ...

Here, Galileo took this crude device ... aberration was a limiting factor in refracting telescopes, and that this could be overcome by making lenses with longer focal length, resulting in monsters ...

By exchanging lenses, you can change the power of the telescope. This article presents two methods of constructing a Galilean telescope — a cardboard tube created by the Galileo Project ...

And soon, sure enough, Galileo went to work making bigger and better telescopes. Large light-gathering lenses were not yet available, so he concentrated on making longer telescopes, which produced ...

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 ...

Five years after the appearance of the great supernova of 1604, Galileo builds his first telescope. He sees the moons of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the phases of Venus, and the stars in the Milky Way.