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 ...

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 ...

One of the biggest limitations of Galilean telescopes, with their combination of a convex and concave lens, was their narrow field of view. Galileo used them to survey the lunar surface ...

Nearly 415 years ago to the day astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered the moons surrounding Jupiter looking through his homemade telescope.