-
Hans Lippershey was a Dutch eyeglass maker and invented the first telescope. He patented this device with 3 tiems the magnification of the human eye in 1608.
-
Galileo Galilei was the first person to look at the moon through a telescope in 1609. He later published statements against the church that the moon was not a perfect sphere. He also discovered that Jupiter has moons that revolve around it instead of Earth.
-
Sir Isaac Newton created the first telescope using mirrors. This reflecting telescope was much clearer than other telescopes that used glass instead of mirrors.
-
William Herschel constructed his first large telescope in 1774. He discovered infared radiation, and the plante Uranus and it's moons in 1781.
-
The Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) was founded in 1904 by George Hale. The observatory was completed in 1908 and dropped the word 'Solar" out of the name.
-
Edwin Hubble discovered the "clouds of light" other astronomers saw were actually other galaxies in 1929. He also used a spectroscope to study light and had discovered another big part of evidence of the Big Bang; red-shifted light. Hubble was the first to correlate a red tint in everything seen in the universe to be moving away and expanding.
-
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled across Cosmic Background Radiation in 1964. This was the first major evidence of the Big Bang.
-
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in the Spring of 1990. The Hubble Telescope has pinpointed the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years old. It has also discovered dark energy and it takes up 95% of the entire cosmos.
-
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) was launched in 2001. It's mission was to discover how big the universe really is.
-
The Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009 with a mission to find other Earth-sized planets. The Kepler Telescope is searchhing for these planets in the neighborhood of our own galaxy.
