"[Reaching] the dim boundary... we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors..."
Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1936)
The legend goes that, playing one day in their father's spectacle shop, two Dutch children realized that if they looked through both a concave lens close to their eye and a concave lens held at arm's length, the local church tower was greatly magnified. Their father, Hans Lippershey (circa 1570-1619), then mounted the two lenses in a tube and tried to sell the device to the Dutch Army.. Whether the credit for this invention should go to Lippershey or to, for example, Zacharius Janssen or Jacob Metius, or even the Englishman Leonard Digges, has become a matter of considerable debate. At the very least, Lippershey is generally credited with popularizing the device, and creating and disseminating designs for the first practical telescope. Soon similar instruments, known as "Dutch
Trunks,"
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