looking back at looking up

looking back at looking up

In 1609, an Italian physicist & astronomer named Galileo became the first person to point a telescope skyward . Although that telescope was small & the images fuzzy , Galileo was able to make out mountains & craters on the moon as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky . which would later be identified as our Milky Way galaxy . After Galileo & , later , in sir Isaac Newton's time , astronomy flourished as a resulf of larger & more complex telescope . With advancing technology , astronomers discovered many faint stars & the calculation of stellar distances . In the 19th century , using a new instrument called a spectroscope , astronomers gathered information about the chemical composition & motions of celestial objects . Twentieth century astronomers developed bigger& bigger telescopes &, later, specialized instruments that could peer into the distant reaches of space & time. Eventually, enlarging telescopes no longer improved our view all because of the Earth's atmosphere.