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The telescope is invented
Hans Lippershey invents the first telescope, although it is unclear whether he built the first telescope. He was a German-Dutch spectacle maker. -
Galileo Galilei studies the night sky
Galileo builds his first telescope with two glass lenses and begins making observations. He discovers that planets orbit around the Sun, not around the Earth. He also finds that the moon is not flawless, contrary to previous belief, but that the moon has craters, valleys, and mountain ridges. Another is Jupiter is a sphere and moons orbit it. -
A new kind of telescope
Isaac Newton uses curved mirrors to make a telescope. The curved mirror works like a lense, but the mirrors don't reflect rainbows. He discovered red shift galaxies. -
"Cassini" is sent out to take pictures of Saturn
Giovanni Cassini finds that Saturn's ring are actually made of several different rings which are made of meteorites and blasted ruptures out of Saturn's moons. -
Herschel discovers Uranus
William Herschel and his sister discover the planet, Uranus. He also found that we live in a huge collection of stars called the Milky Way that there are nebulae, consisted of stars and luminous clouds. -
Mount Wilson Observatory is founded
George Hale founded the Mount Wilson Observatory, California. It is first used in 1908. Astronomers, like Hubble, used the 60-inch telescope for studies that led to the classification of stars by their light spectrum. -
Hubble discovers the universe is expanding
Edwin Hubble discovers the distances between galaxies like the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy. He finds that the farther away galaxies are, the stronger the redshift and the faster they're are moving away which shows that the universe is growing bigger. -
Strong evidence for big bang is found
Wilson and Penzias identified the redshifted glow of light that was released when atoms first formed that could only be detected today as microwaves which confirmed cosmic background radiation existed. This provided the strongest evidence to date for the big bang. -
Hubble Telescope is launched
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. The telescope found dark energy which makes up roughly 70% of the universe. -
Kepler Space Telescope launches
The Kepler Telescope was launched to discover earth-like planets orbiting stars. The Kepler collected light from stars in the Milky Way. Some exoplanets were discovered, but were too close to their suns to sustain life.
