Posted by Davin Flateau on 15 Feb 2006 at 4:41 pm.
Filed under General, Astronomy.
The great Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galileii was born on this day in 1564. His work and invention in astronomy was nothing short of revolutionary, as he observed and recorded details about Jupiter, the Moon, sunspots, and the stars that would rock our view of the Universe from that moment on.
His observations were critical to the argument that Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun, as opposed to the the convoluted theory of the day that the other planets went around the sun, which all then revolved around the earth and moon. He also was one of the first people to describe the physical behavior of gravity. Galileo is often incorrectly cited as the inventor of the telescope — he improved upon the telescope design of the day (which had been used to observe distant objects on the ground), and was the first person we know of to point one to the sky and record what he saw. In this sense, he can probably be called the first telescopic astronomer.
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