24 horrifying facts about telescopes

24 horrifying facts about telescopes

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Have you ever looked up and wondered what that ball of light in the sky really was, or what it looked like?

The telescope, a device loved by many, from professional astronomers to backyard stargazers, has been around for centuries.

But how much do you really know about telescopes?

In the following, we will examine 24 facts about the portal to the stars.

The earliest known illustration of the telescope is actually a drawing made in a letter made in 1609. It was drawn by Giovanbattista della Porta.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) travels around the earth at nearly 17,000 miles per hour (27,300 km / h), 22 times faster than the World Record of speed on land for the fastest car.

The HST is a staggering 43.5 ft (13.2 meters) long and weighs 24,000 lbs (10,886 kg).

The telescope was a derivative of the Latin phrase tele, meaning at a long distance, and scopium, meaning to check or see.

Galileo is often believed to have caused blindness when looking at the sun through his telescope, although this cannot be confirmed, it is now believed to be the combined cause of glaucoma.

In March 2016, the Kepler Space Telescope saw a star 500 times the size of the sun, a supernova about 1.2 billion light-years away from us.

During the Apollo 1969 Apollo Moon landing mission, Pope Paul actually watched the moon inside the Vatican Observatory before watching the moon walk on television.

Another term used when discussing telescopes is First Light;

When building telescopes, the main concern is usually clarity rather than distance, we can see millions of light years away but the clarity of the planets, their surfaces, and their characteristics.

In the list of the 10 largest telescopes in the world, Chile alone accounts for 50% of the list.

In the movies, pirates are often seen sweeping the horizon with a device called the Pirate Telescope.

We all know the "typical" telescope, an optical device that is used to magnify, but did you know there are other types of telescopes?

Karl Guthe Janksy invented the world's first Radio Telescope in 1930;

Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) is designed to detect photons and costs $ 617,000,000 to develop.

The original use of telescopes in the 17th century was to detect merchant ships arriving to allow them to dominate trading.

Parsonstown's Leviathan, built in Ireland, has been the largest telescope in the world for over 30 years.

Earth 2.0 is the name given to a planet believed to be most Earth-like, discovered in 2015 using the Kepler Telescope.

HST took a famous photo called Pillars of Creation.

Comedian, actor and a funny man.

Canada's first space telescope;

The largest active telescope actually found in the Canary Islands is known as the Gran Telescopio Canarias.

There is actually a binocular-like telescope that consists of 2 parallel telescopes and is named the Large Binocular Telescope.

The Hubble space telescope was named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble in 1983.

In 2001, Japan's Super-Kamiokande Underground Observatory encountered a serious incident and turned dire.

So we have it, 25 telescope facts, from the original recorded shape to the amazing size of the largest modern telescope, they are just unbelievable!