Charles Niu SID: 230 Johnathan Wright Section 109 400 Years of the Telescope lab The documentary

400 years of the Telescope featured an overarching history of technological developments in the field of optics, and how they correlated to advancements in astronomical thought. Starting with the inventions of the first telescopes in the Netherlands and later Renaissance Italy, the film began with its first Astronomy icon, Galileo. Galileo was portrayed as a bit of a martyr for science, having proved the Copernican theory of a heliocentric universe over Ptolemys geocentric universe, and as a result suffering house arrest when his publications spurred discord with the Catholic Church (one of the professors interviewed described the heliocentric theory as the correct one, this made me chuckle slightly, as though the professor still thought the universe revolved around the sun). Following Galileo the movie soon moved through Kepler and onto Newton, who invented a new reflecting telescope, which used mirrors to remove the issue of chromatic aberration in refracting telescopes. This led to later jumps in technology with the giant 200 meter-long Lick-observatory telescope of the 19th century. Further technological advances allow for modern telescopes like the twin Keck 10meter diameter telescopes. Modern telescopes make use of adaptive optics to account for some of the atmospheric blurring. Another way to account for the interference of the atmosphere is to send telescopes into space. The shining beacon of this was the Hubble space telescope, which despite having early mirror issues, grew to become one of the most important projects of mankind, helping with all sorts of discoveries, such as the case of the accelerating universe. The movie ended on a positive note, pondering the question of where future advancements may one day take mankind.

Overall I felt the movie to be well constructed, narrated, and animated. If I were a movie critic however, I would point at the odd out-of-chronological order of things. The movie jumps from advancements of telescopes in the past, to the future, and then jumps back to astronomers in the past again. At times it was very disorienting. Another issue that strikes discord with me is the ethnocentricity of the film. Albeit this point only strikes me as I write this paper, I find it odd that the history of the telescope presented in this movie lies exclusively in Western European and North American venues. 400 years of the western-European telescope may be a more fitting title. The film completely ignores any advancements the Arab, Indian, Chinese, or even Mayan peoples may have had to contribute to the fields of optics and astronomy. Overall though, the film was a good everything we learned so far review for Astronomy, and it was a blast to see the professor on TV.