The full title of the book "The Starry Messenger, signaling the great and amazing spectacles and offers for consideration to everyone, especially the philosophers and astronomers,what is that Galileo Galilei, Florentine patrician, State mathematician of Padua High School, watched using a telescope, he has recently invented, on the surface Moon, among the countless stars in the Milky Way, nebula stars, and especially on the four planets orbiting the star of Jupiter at unequal distances with unequal periods and amazing speed, they are not known to this day not a single person, the object-glass author recently discovered and decided to name them Medici stars. "
The book of 32 pages was published in Venice 400 years ago - in March 1610. Galileo Galilei described in it what he saw in the sky through his telescope.
Galileo began producing telescopes in autumn 1609. The fourth one was a length of 124.5 cm, with a plano-convex lens of a diameter of 5.35 cm as an object-glass and a plano-concave lens diameter of 2.5 cm as an eyepiece, and gave thirtyfold increase. With it, Galileo made the first startling discoveries, which two months later wrote out in "The Starry Messenger".
Here are some excerpts from "The Starry Messenger" (from the book: I.A.Klimishin "Astronomy Yesterday and Today." K., Naukova Dumka, 1976).
"Ten months ago, I have heard a rumor that a certain Dutchman made a spyglass through which visible objects, though far distant, were clearly visible as near.
... This was the pretext that I fully carried by the study causes and inventing tools that would allow me to become an inventor of a similar device; Soon, delving into the theory of refraction, I did it; First I made a lead pipe, the ends of which I fitted two optical glass, both are flat on one side and on the other the first was spherically convex; bringing the eye to the concave glass, I saw things big enough and close ...
Leaving the Earth objects, I limited myself to the study of celestial ones and first watched the Moon so close, as if it was at a distance of only two diameters of the Earth ...
... We have come to a conclusion that we can confidently assume that the surface of the Moon is not so smooth, even and accurate spherical, as a large number of philosophers think about it and other celestial bodies, but, on the contrary, rough, coated with valleys and hills, it is quite similar to the Earth's surface ...
... Now let’s say briefly what we had found in the fixed stars. It is striking that the stars as fixed as well as wandering ones, when viewed through the telescope do not look enlarged in size, and the same proportion as it happens with the other subjects, and even the Moon ... when viewed in a telescope they show a same nature as in the observations with the naked eye, but only to such an extent that the star fifth and sixth magnitude looks like Dog (Sirius) – the biggest of all the fixed stars. However, below the sixth magnitude you can see through the telescope so large number of other stars that can barely believe ...
Then, the object of our observation was the essence or the matter of the Milky Way. With the help of the telescope it can be clearly observed and all the disputes that for so many centuries, tortured philosophers, are destroyed by clear evidence, and we will get rid lengthy debates. Indeed, Galaxy is nothing more than a collection of numerous stars arranged in groups ...
... Now perhaps the most important, namely, that we opened (and bring it to the public) four planets had not yet seen anyone from the beginning of the world to this day ...
. We had a wonderful and bright evidence for the avoidance of doubt among those who are comfortable with the rotation in Copernic’s system, but so embarrassing about the movement of the Moon around the Earth, while they both together describe a circle around the sun yearly, even find it necessary to drop such as the structure of the universe as an impossible. Now we have more than one planet that revolves around the other, while they both run a big circle around the sun, but our senses show us four lights that revolve around Jupiter, the Moon around the Earth, while all of them together with Jupiter in 12 years fly a large circle around the sun ... ".
10 years before the publication of "The Starry Messenger" - February 17, 1600 - Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno in Rome - an active promoter of the idea of an infinite universe. 6 years after the release - in March 1616 - "Sacred Congregation" ban the book of Nicholas Copernicus' On the Revolutions of Heavenly Circuit. "And in August 1632, Galileo published his book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Main World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican." And this, in particular, he has demonstrated that to defend the truth, we must be persistent and do not be afraid.
Prepared by V.Mikolaenko
