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On October 2, 1608, Hans Lippershey invented the first functional telescope. He was a German-Dutch inventor who worked with spectales which led him to deveople the first telescope. Though it is debated where the design for this telescope came from, Hans is credited with the invention.
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Galileo Galilei invented the first optical refracting telescope in 1609. This telescope uses convergent lenses and also uses a divergent eyepiece. This refracting telescope pojects an upright image, as opposed to the normal flipped image a telescope projects.
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Giovanni Demisiani, a Greek mathematician, coined the name telescope in 1611. He coined it after observing one of Galileo Galilei's instruments at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei. It comes from the Greek word teleskopos, meaing to see far.
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In 1641, William Gascoigne invited the cross hairs for the telescope. Normally a "+" sign, it was invented to help tell distances in space. It was also the base for Robert Hoke's invention of the reticle invented later in the 1700s.
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Issac Newton invented the Newtonian Telescope in 1688. This was the first reflectional telescope. Their very simple design made them popular with beginner telescope makers.
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Chester Moor Hall invented the achromatic lens refracting telescope in 1733.To make this lens, Hall mixed both crown glass and flint glass. This new lens reduced color aberrations. This made for smaller and better fuctioning telescopes.
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In the year 1783, Jesse Ramsden invented a new eyepiece, the Eponymous. This eyepiece consisted of two plano-convex lenses. These lenses make it very suitable for far range observation. Unfortunately that comes at a price because it has a very small view.
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Carl Kellner, in 1849, created the Achromatic eyepiece. Kellner used a three piece lens with a achromatic doublet. This made it much cheaper to make, yet have almost the same quality as Ramsden eyepiece.
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In 1880, Ernst Abbe created the Orthoscopic eyepiece. This eyepiece had four lenses, a triple and a sigle lens. These four lenses and the spacing between them help with eye relief and aberrations.
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In 1910 George Willis Ritchey and Henri Chrétien work together to invent the Ritchey-Chrétien Telescope. This telescope had the largest view of any other to date, making it very popular for photographic observations. However, it was very expense, making it a very high-performance professional telescope.
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Bernhard Schmidt, in 1930, invented the Schmidt camera. This camera was very revoltionary for its time, eliminating all the negitive effects of the pictures (such as coma and other things), and developed very clear pictures. It also had a very large lens which captured more in every photo.
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Dmitri Dmitrievich Maksutov, in 1944, created the Maksutov telescope. This telescope used a spherical mirror. It also used a negitive lens. his combonation helped with reducing coma and aberrations.
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On December 12,1970, Uhuru was lauched. I was the first telescope lauched into space. I took about 96 minutes to orbit the earth, making it travel around 17,000 mph or more. It had two telescopes on each side for observation.
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This telescope, located in Suthern Russia, has finished in 1975. Plans for this telescope started as early as 1950. This telescope is important because it was the first major telescope to use an altazimuth mount. This mount is completely computerized for accurate observation.
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Max Tegmark and Matias Zaldarriaga combined knowledge to create the Fast Fourier Transform Telescope in 2008. This telescope used a variety of different mirrors to create a greater resolution because of interferometry. This is used for a variety of astronomical observation.
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The James Webb telescope is schedeled to be lauched by NASA in 2018. Its goal is to find galaxies that existed in the universes early years, hoping to support the big band theory. It is a very large, infrared-optimized space telescope.
