![]() While not being the only one to observe the moon through a telescope, Galileo was the first to deduce the cause of the uneven waning as light occlusion from lunar mountains and craters. Galileo, due in part to his artistic training and the knowledge of chiaroscuro (see notes 1), had understood the patterns of light and shadow were, in fact, topographical markers. ![]() Reporting his observations, Harriot noted only “strange spottedness” in the waning of the crescent, but was ignorant to the cause. However, based on his extant correspondence as well as entries in his notebooks, as in the case of sunspots, Harriot did not appear to have drawn any particular physical significance from what he saw. Prior to Galileo‘s construction of his version of a telescope, Thomas Harriot (1560 – 2 July 1621), an English mathematician, and explorer had already used what he dubbed a “perspective tube” to observe the moon, on the evening of July 26, 1609. They represent the first realistic depiction of the Moon in history. Galileo Galilei produced this extremely famous set of six watercolors of the Moon in its various phases “from life”, as he observed the Earth’s satellite through a telescope in the autumn of 1609 (by his own account, he first observed the Moon on November 30, 1609). ![]()
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