BTW, one more little historical footnote. Aristotle had also envisioned the heliocentric model but came to reject it for what were actually valid scientific objections: that if the earth moved then the stars should evidence a parallax. This was the same basis upon which Ptolemy and others would then resist the ideas of Aristarchus. What the ancient Greeks didn't comprehend was how far away the stars were, and therefore how miniscule their parallax.
There was another very powerful reason for the ancients to believe that the earth didn't move. It's so ridiculous sounding now that it's virtually never mentioned, but before Isaac Newton (a generation after Galileo's trial) it was regarded as a great problem. The argument was that if the earth moves, then why doesn't it leave the moon behind?
Think about it. If no one knew (before Newton) that gravity was the same on earth and in the heavens, then the problem was a very real concern. Galileo's telescope, which showed that Jupiter (which everyone agreed was moving) had moons, yet the moons somehow stayed with it, was the killer observation. But it wasn't until Newton that any real understanding of this was possible.