***Images updated.*** Next week, you can check out the rich collection of astronomical instruments at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, the planetarium opens its a new exhibition, “Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass,” on May 22. The show spotlights technology used to gather information about our universe since Galileo’s day and includes hands-on interactive exhibits. The trumpet-shaped telescope...

Telescopes have extended the human senses to unimaginably distant and inhospitable parts of the universe. A documentary beginning to air this week on public television stations in the United States tells the story of the telescope and its unveiling of the cosmos — starting with that simple little tube Galileo pointed at the Sun, Moon, and stars . The 60-minute documentary is called 400 Years of the Telescope: a journey of science, technology, and...

On Christmas Day, 1758, a German amateur astronomer and farmer named Johann Georg Palitzsch did something that would have made a great Christmas gift for English astronomer Edmond Halley. Johann “recovered” Halley’s Comet, meaning he was the first to observe this previously observed “dirty snowball” as it returned to the inner solar system. Edmond Halley (1656-1742) calculated the orbit of the comet that now bears his name based on previous sightings...