Telescopes

A chronological history of the invention and development of the telescope, and a bibliography on the history of telescopes and astronomy .

The Vikings could have been using a telescope hundreds of years before Dutch spectacle makers supposedly invented the device in the late 16th century -- a remarkable possibility which emerged from a study of sophisticated lenses from a Viking site on Gotland.

The history of Galileo's telescope, with an animated simulation of how it worked.

The Museum, part of the University of Bologna's Department of Astronomy, houses a collection of astrolabes, gnomons & sundials, clocks, astronomical quadrants, telescopes, armillary spheres, globes, maps, and other mathematical, meteorologic, topographic and nautical instruments.

The Institute and Museum of the History of Science, in Florence, is one of the foremost internatio nal institutio ns in the history of science, combining a noted museum of scientific instrument s and an institute dedicated to the research, documentat ion and disseminat ion of the history of science in the broadest senses.

Over the last few years studies have shown that maybe the reflecting telescope was the invention of an English surveyor and his son. The crude telescope would have enabled English commanders to sight Spanish galleons, and given Elizabethan astronomers unrivalled glimpses of the moon and stars.