Tant: Galileo opened heavens for scientific discovery

It has been 400 years now since the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei used a new device called a telescope to view the heavens. It has been 50 years since I first viewed the moon and planets through a telescope my parents gave me as a Christmas gift in 1959, when I was 12 years old. When I first gazed at the moon and the planets with the little instrument, I felt some of the same awe, humility and wonder that Galileo himself must have felt on those long-ago nights in Italy when he aimed his epoch-making instrument to the skies in 1609.

Galileo did not invent the telescope. That honor probably belongs to a Dutchman named Hans Lippershey, a maker of eyeglasses. When it was first invented around 1608, the telescope was probably used to view ships at sea or amorous neighbors who had forgotten to close the curtains. What Galileo did was to turn the telescope from the mundane Earth to the majestic cosmos.

Though a now-forgotten astronomer in England had used a telescope to make a drawing of the moon in the summer of 1609, it was Galileo who first made telescopic observations a systematic science by publishing his findings in books and articles.

In August 1609, Galileo demonstrated his telescope to lawmakers in Venice. If lawmakers then were like lawmakers now, they probably looked through the wrong end of the device. Galileo's first instrument was puny, magnifying objects only about eight times larger than seen with his unaided eye. By November 1609, Galileo was using a much more powerful telescope that magnified objects about 20 times, to view craters on the moon and the planets Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.

Gazing at Venus, he saw that the planet has phases like our moon. Saturn baffled the astronomer, whose telescope was not quite powerful enough to resolve the magnificent rings that girdle the planet. Galileo thought that what we now know as the rings of Saturn might have been some sort of strange moons, or what he called "jug handles," attache

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