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The telescope was invented by Hans Lippershey.
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In Italy, Galileo Galilei looked at the sky with a telescope, finding out many things. One is that the moon has crators. Others are that Jupiter is a sphere, Jupiter has moons, Venus appears to change shape so it goes around the sun, and Saturn has "ears" (which are actually its rings).
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Christann Huyges proposed that Saturn was surrounded by a solid, "thin, flat ring," that was "nowhere touching," the planet.
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Isaac Newton created a reflecting telescope that uses mirrors instead of lenses, so the light doesn't get split and blur the image. This allows for much shorter telescopes.
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Giovanni Domenico Cassini determined that Saturn's ring was composed of multiple smaller rings with gaps between them.
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Herschel builds a 20 foot long telescope and sees the disc - shaped Milky Way. He makes a map of it called the grindstone.
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Sir Frederick William Herschel discovered Uranus with his sister. They used a much larger version of Newton's reflecting telescope.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested that the rings were composed of a large number of solid ringlets.
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Lord Rosse used his largest telescope to see the spiral structure of a nebula called M51.
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James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that the rings could not be solid or they would become unstable and break apart.
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People built a telescope at the top of a mountain because the air is clearer up there. They used mirrors because big glass lenses bend. They saw things past our galaxy.
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Cosmic Background Radiation was accidentally discovered when some scientists pointed a radio telescope where there should be no heat. It is 3 degrees above absolute zero.
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The Hubble Space Telescope was launched.
