On a January night in 1610, Galileo started a revolution in astronomy when he directed a crude telescope toward the sky and discovered four moons around Jupiter. It was the first time a man had looked into the heavens beyond the range of his own eyes. Now, more than three and a half centuries later, powerful telescopes orbit the earth on artificial satellites, exploring deeper into space.

Here is a history of the revolution begun by Galileo, told through the lives of ten men who developed the telescope in its many forms. There is the story of the nearsighted Kepler, who improved Galileo’s telescope, and of the solitary Newton, who used mirrors instead of lenses in his instrument.

Also included are men whose telescopes are very different from Galileo’s simple set of lenses. As a young radio amateur, Grote Reber built a dish-shaped "ear” that became the model for today’s huge radio telescopes. Navy astronomer Herbert Friedman’s rocket-launched telescopes have led a new generation of skywatchers into X-ray astronomy, a science that did not exist until the 1960’s.

All of the men whose lives and work you will read about in this book are astronomers whose dedication to pure and practical science has contributed significantly to our increasing store of knowledge about the universe.

From the dust jacket