Seeing the Universe
Before 1608
1608 - Galileo's hand held telescopes 1673 - Hevelius' long telescopes 1780 - Herschel's large reflectors 1838 - Meridian Circles 1845 - Rosse's Leviathian 1890 - Barnard's camera 1923 - The Hooker 100 inch 1948 - The Palomar 200 inch 1990 - The Hubble Space Telescope 1998 - The Keck 10 metre pair 2000 - The VLT array 2015 - Planning for the JWST 2020? - Planning the OWL How much further?
In the period up to 1608
, through patient, long-term, naked eye observation, astronomers accumulated
enough data to see beyond the apparent dome of the sky. The culmination of the
naked eye era was the production of Tycho Brahe's planetary positions tables
and Kepler's deduction of their eliptical orbits from that data.
Early Astronomers and their Instruments
From Camille Flammarion, 1888
(Rocky Kolb, Blind Wathchers of the Sky, Addison Wesley 1996)