Posted on 10/15/2009 11:09:42 AM PDT by BGHater
It's hard to find an invention more emblematic of the birth of modern science than the telescope. And yet surprisingly little is known about its early development. The inventor of the telescope remains unknown to this day.
Now a study of the paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder, a Flemish painter of the Baroque era who was working in Amsterdam at the beginning of the 17th century, is throwing some light on the early development of the telescope. It has also uncovered a mystery, say Paolo Molaro and Pierluigi Selvelli at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Trieste. One of Brueghel's works appears to show a Keplerian-style telescope in a painting dating from 15 years before this design was thought to have been built.
Although various writers in the 16th century describe glasses that can "recognize a man from several miles away," the early exploitation of this idea is credited to the Dutch lens maker Hans Lippershey, who in 1608 applied for a patent for a device "for seeing things far away as if they were nearby." However, his application was rejected, apparently because the idea was already well known.
Molaro and Selvelli, who have studied the telescopes depicted in five paintings by Brueghel, say that Lippershey is known to have given one of his earliest instruments to Archduke Albert VII of Habsburg, who had a keen interest in natural philosophy.
That's significant because Brueghel was Albert's court painter. Molaro and Selvelli say that the spyglass depicted in Brueghel's "Extensive Landscape with View of the Castle of Mariemont," dated 1608-1612, is the first painting of a telescope ever made. They go further and speculate that this instrument is the one given to Albert by Lippershey.
The earliest telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. But Johannes Kepler suggested in 1611 that a better design would have a convex eyepiece. The advantage is a larger field of view and greater relief for the eye, which needn't be placed so close to the eyepiece. The disadvantage, which astronomers eventually came to live with, is that the image is inverted.
Kepler's design wasn't built until much later. The first reference to such an instrument appears in 1631. But here's a mystery: Molaro and Selvelli speculate that a telescope in "The Allegory of Sight," a collaboration between Brueghel and Pierre Paul Rubens dating from 1617, is actually Keplerian (see picture above).
The evidence is twofold. First is the length of the instrument: Molaro and Selvelli estimate that the extended instrument would be some 180 cm or so long. Keplerian designs are longer than the earlier Galilean designs (a misnomer, since Galileo did not invent them). Second is the size of the eyepiece, which appears to limit how close the eye can get to the eyepiece lens. That would only make sense in a Keplerian design.
The question then is who built this telescope, and what was it used for. Keplerian designs can achieve much higher magnifications than their Galilean cousins. That would have given its owner a significant advantage over anyone else scanning the heavens.
If they'd troubled to look, that is. Could it be that the owner of one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet failed to point it skywards? And in failing to do so, missed a chance at the kind of scientific immortality that Galileo was later to achieve?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0908.2696: The Mystery of the Telescopes in Jan Brueghel the Elder's Paintings
The Dance
by William Carlos Williams
Try to say it without speeding up.
In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.
Simple answer is that the image of the telescope was photoshopped in later, by Huygens or Kepler himself.
If you look just to the right of the hand in the picture you can clearly see an iPhone too.
It is no surprise really, With all the times I’ve gone back in time I’ve more than once left a few modern accouterments. It was a virtual certainty that one of them would end up in a painting. People were amazed by the stuff.
I do get tired of scientists always claiming to know more than they actually do. They seem to have such tightly closed little minds.
Stranger still - why is it pointed into the armpit of that winged toddler?
>>I do get tired of scientists always claiming to know more than they actually do. They seem to have such tightly closed little minds.
It's evidence of the existence of time machines.
And behind the legs of the Cherub on the right is the stainless steel barrel of a 50 cal. sniper rifle.
Maybe it’s a Jacob Metius telescope. He was supposed to have destroyed all his work, but maybe he really didn’t.
Galileo wasn’t the inventor of the telescope. He was the first person to point it at the sky.
Some guys in Holland had invented the telescope years before, there isn’t any strangeness that one would appear in a painting by a Dutch painter just a few years before Galileo.
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I don’t know if I should be surprised or not by their lack of comment on the height of the support.
Looks perfect for setting up on a balcony rail or roof rampart and ooking DOWN or OUT; not up, suggestive of military or other mundane usage. It would be very ackward and uncomfortable to use for sky watching.
An unusual puzzle.
(Personally, I’m going for the photoshop editing - You just know that those Renniie painters re-did “all” their first drafts several times, did a spell-check (for witches and whatevers) and then submitted their final version.
Besides, that font of telescope didn’t exist until Paintshop Pro Ver 1491.
Clearly the Angels were delivering a telescope that was made by God.... and God is ahead of his time
thanks, bfl
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