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The invention of the telescope marked a turning point in the evolution of astronomy and science in general.

The first telescope is believed to have been created by lens maker Hans Lippershey in Holland during the early years of the 17th century.

According to one of the stories associated with the discovery, Lippershey's sons were playing with a pair of lenses in his workshop when they noticed that, with a certain combination of them, the size of distant objects was magnified.

Lippershey observed this phenomenon and secretly offered the invention to the crown of his country, given its indisputable strategic value.

In the demonstrations that followed was a friend of Galileo Galilei, who on his return to Italy told him with great enthusiasm what he had seen in them.

This happened in November 1609, and Galileo, without losing a moment and having imagined how the same effect could be achieved, began to experiment with the lenses of a friend of his, a manufacturer of glasses.

Thus he succeeded, in a few days, in reproducing the phenomenon of the magnification of distant objects, thinking immediately of its application to the study of the firmament.

To mount the lenses of his first instrument, Galileo used an old organ pipe, and on the night of January 6, 1610, he premiered his telescope by pointing it at the Moon, the stars, and the planet Jupiter, which could be seen at dusk.

Besides being the first man to see the craters of the Moon, and hundreds of stars of low magnitude never seen before, his most important discovery was that of the satellites of Jupiter, whose observation during several days ratified the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and made him write his famous treatise "Sidereus Nuncius" that immediately circulated throughout Europe.

Modern astronomy was born. Galileo built several dozen similar telescopes, made with a convex objective lens, about three centimeters in diameter, and another concave and smaller lens, called the eyepiece because it was the closest to the eye of the observer.

This type of telescope, composed of lenses, is called a refractor. Later, the German Johannes Kepler improved Galileo's instrument by using a convex lens as an eyepiece, which considerably increased the field of the telescope, although it inverted the magnified image.

It should be clarified that the improvement introduced by Kepler was relative, since although it provided a larger field, it caused a greater spherical aberration in the resulting image with respect to Galileo's design, which in a way compensated for this effect.

The Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, in the mid-seventeenth century, tried to combat spherical aberration by lengthening the focal length of his objectives, which also achieved a proportionally greater magnification of the image; thanks to this he was able to verify that Saturn, the "triple planet" previously described by Galileo, was not such, but was actually surrounded by a brilliant ring.

In 1655, Huygens also discovered Titan, the first known satellite of Saturn.

Years later, the Englishman Isaac Newton, who believed that spherical aberration could never be corrected, devised another type of telescope, the reflector, based on mirrors. Newton's reasoning was simple and brilliant: if light did not pass through any lens, spherical aberration would no longer be a problem.

His telescope earned him admission to the Academy of Science in England.