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Hans Lippershey is given credit for the first telescope, although he never pointed it to the sky. Galileo beat him to that task.
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Galileo builds the first telescope, although he only solved the problem of building it, he did not have any of the original ideas.
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Niccolo Zucchi attemps to make a reflecting telescope using a concave bronze mirror.
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James Gregory invents the gregorian telescope design.
Although because of the time's technological limitations, the first model is built 10 years later -
Isaac Newton is credited with the first practical telescope in 1668 dubbed "Newtonian".
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Jesse Ramsden invents the telescope eyepiece.
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The largest achromatic telescope is built by Alvan Clark , it is currently at the Yerkes Observatory, Winsconsin. Its aperture is 102cm in diameter.
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The largest refracting telescope is built for the Great Paris Exhibition. It was 57m long and 1.25m in diameter. It was barely used for scientific purposes as it wasn't designed for such tasks.
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The first X-ray picture of our Sun is taken by a non-optical telescope
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The Uhuru becomes the first space telescope to look at objects tin gamma rays.
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On april 24th 1990, NASA launches the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit around Earth.
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NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) left Earth onboard a Delta II rocket on June 11th 2008.
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The Gran Telescopio Canarias is built in the Canary islands of Spain at 7 438 feet above sea level, it's the largest one built to date.
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NASA launched thei rmost recent X-Ray telescope around Earth to search for Black Holes and other hard-to-see celestial objects for about 2 years.
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The James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch in 2018 as Hubble's successor, it will orbit around the Sun 1.5M kilometers beyond Earth. Its misson is set to last 5 years.