A look back at the 400-year-old art of assisted sky-gazing

Palomar Observatory courtesy Palomar Observatory

Humans have been looking to the heavens for as long as we have had stories to tell about them. But the way we look up has come quite far in the past 400 years, since Galileo Galilei first pointed a spyglass to the sky.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, Popular Science looks back on the top 10 observatories on Earth and beyond.

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2 Comments

Astonishing that you left out William Herschel's 40" reflector telescope, which did so much to lay the foundations of modern astronomy.

Even more astonishing that you left out Arecibo



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November 2009: Astronaut 3.0

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