Sleepy History - Telescopes

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

Narrated By: Arif Hodzic Written By: Laila Weir Telescopes quietly widened humanity’s view of the universe, drawing distant lights closer to wondering eyes. From simple lenses held beneath darkened skies to great observatories gazing into the depths of space, they revealed moons, rings, and galaxies drifting in silence. Each discovery softened the boundary between Earth and the stars. Tonight, wander through the origins, discoveries, and lasting legacy of telescopes, as you drift into a peaceful and dream-filled sleep. Includes mentions of: Science & Nature, Scientific Experiments, Outer Space, Heights, and Flying. #history #sleep #bedtime #telescopes #scientific #experiments #outer #space About Sleepy History Explore history's most intriguing stories, people, places, events, and mysteries, delivered in a supremely calming atmosphere. If you struggle to fall asleep and you have a curious mind, Sleepy History is the perfect bedtime companion. Our stories will gently grasp your attention, pulling your mind away from any racing thoughts, making room for the soothing music and calming narration to guide you into a peaceful sleep. Want to enjoy Sleepy History ad-free? Start your 7-day free trial of Sleepy History Premium: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sleepyhistory.supercast.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Have feedback or an episode request? Let us know at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠slumberstudios.com/contact⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To learn more, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.slumberstudios.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. Tonight, we're going to explore an invention that's allowed human beings to peer into the heavens, revealing parts of the universe that were invisible to the naked eye. This invention is the telescope. We'll trace its development from the earliest handheld instruments through the incredible James Webb Space Telescope,

which now orbits the sun a million miles from Earth. It gazes into the far reaches of space and time, recording far-away galaxies and long-ago light. We'll also examine some of the discovery that telescopes have made possible and the celestial secrets they've uncovered. So just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of telescopes. You picture the darkened sky at nighttime, the vast blackness scattered with sparkling stars, the filmy strip of the Milky Way sprawling across it.

Our ancestors stared up at that sight long ago and wondered about those twinkling points of light. The view has changed very little since early humans saw it eons ago, and it still has the same power to spark wonder in our hearts. today, as it has since the dawn of time, gazing at the vastness of the starscape, can still evoke a feeling of curiosity, amazement, in the earliest moments of human history. It prompted our forebears

to wonder about the story of the stars. They could only watch, wait, and wonder at what they could see with their own eyes in the night sky. Today, though, we can see images deep in space that our ancestors could never have imagined. Yet these images still have the power to induce a great sense of wonder at the mystery and majesty of the cosmos. Take this image, captured not long ago with technology so futuristic that it can sound more like science fiction than actual fact, though I assure you that it is fact indeed. It shows a dramatic spiral glowing, blueish-white, against a background of star-spangled black. Delicate strands and billowing clouds form the spiral's arms,

swirling outward from a center of Robin's egg blue. The glowing spiral is a galaxy, a star system far away. Its technical name is M74, but it's also known as the Phantom Galaxy. It's located within the cluster of stars that we humans viewing from Earth call the Pisces constellation. The phantom galaxy belongs to a category of spiral galaxies that astronomers have named Grand Design Spirals. By this, they mean that its shape is sharp and distinct. As compared, to other spiral galaxies whose outlines are vaguer and more amorphous,

and the grand design spirals name fits. The spiral is very grand, indeed. Whips of gas and dust form a lattice pattern that looks as fragile as a spider's web in the very center of the spiral. There's no gas, revealing a clear view of a knot of stars around which the galaxy swirls. The image is splendid and breathtaking in its beauty. It was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. This huge telescope was launched into space on Christmas Day in 2021, where it settled into orbit.

Almost a million miles from home. Quickly, it began transmitting striking images, revealing previously unseen features of the universe in awe-inducing brilliance. The Webb Telescope has produced the clearest images of distant galaxies and far-off details of the heavens ever seen by huge. human eyes. And it's also recorded the clearest images of the past. That's because, on the scale of the universe, space can always equal time. It takes time for the light from distant stars to

reach us here on Earth. The farther away the star, the longer its light takes to reach us. If we look at our sun, we're actually seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago. That's how long it takes for the sun's light to reach us. The next nearest stars are much farther away than our sun. And their light takes some four years to reach us. So, when we look upon those stars, we're seeing them as they were four years ago.

And so it is that when we gaze into the starry night, we're actually looking into the past by four years or more, mostly much more. For example, let us turn our mind's eyes towards the Orion constellation. The star pattern is most notable for a band of three distinct stars that form a line to the ancient Greeks. This line marked the belt of a mythological hunter named Orion. Within this constellation, we encounter the Orion Nebula, whose light takes 1,500 years to reach us. This means that when we look at it now, we are actually seeing how this nebula looked

around the year 500. As for the Phantom Galaxy, our glowing spiral from the beginning of this story, it is 32 million light years away. In other words, that Webb Telescope image shows the galaxy as it was 32 million years ago, long before humans walked the earth, or gazed at the heavens, or conceived of creating instruments to examine the stars. Scientists are using the web telescopes phantom galaxy images as part of an effort to discover more about how stars.

formed during the earlier days of the universe. The telescopes clearer observations will help them get a read on just how old the stars in these galaxies are. They can combine the web data with material gathered by other earthbound telescopes. Together, this information will allow us to learn more about the formation of the universe than ever possible before. The first inventors of the telescope weren't thinking about looking back in time, and they had no conception of how vast and ancient our universe truly seems to be. Instead, early telescope makers wanted to examine the visible sky in greater detail. They wanted to look closer at the object.

they could already see at night, including our own moon and closest planetary neighbors. These remained great mysteries at that time. Meanwhile, the farther out planets of our solar system hadn't even been discovered yet because they weren't visible to the naked eye. Humans had observed the night sky since before history began. watching the stars and weaving intricate tales about them. These stories included myths that live on today in the names of constellations like Pisces and Orion.

Some ancient people made more methodical observations of the stars too. They kept complex records and even formed accurate predictions about celestial. movements. Then, several hundred years ago, the advent of the telescope brought the cosmos into focus in a whole new way, launching modern astronomy on a sky-high trajectory, quite literally. Here's how it began. Around the start of the 1600s, craftsmen in the Netherlands were making advances in creating eyeglasses to allow people to see better. They drew on knowledge about the science of optics that had been developing throughout the Middle Ages. Various scholars and innovators had made advances in the area over the prior

centuries. These included the Islamic scientists Al-Kindi in the 9th century and Ibn Saul and Ibn Al-Heitham in the 10th, as well as the English Christian friar and scientist Roger Bacon in the 13th century. Inventors in Europe began to use lenses to magnify objects and make them appear closer than they were. In 1608, several different spectacle makers in the Netherlands, created what were essentially the first telescopes. However, these were intended for earthbound use, something like a spotting scope or binoculars, not for observation of the cosmos. They were referred to as perspective glasses, and they magnified objects three times, making them look three times larger or closer than they looked normally.

The fact that several different spectacle makers created these prospective glasses at the same time highlights the reality that they were drawing on a significant amount of existing knowledge in the field. At the time, however, it led to battles over who would get credit for the innovation. and wealth from it. Two spectacle makers in one town, Hans Lipperhey and Zacharias Janssen, both developed prototypes, leading to some claims that the former stole the idea from the latter. Lipperhaye filed a patent for this instrument for, as he described it, seeing things far away as if they were near.

A few weeks later, another lens maker from another part of the Netherlands named Jakub Maitius applied for a very similar patent. The government of the Netherlands turned down both patent applications, but paid Lipperhay a good deal of money to create binoculars using the technology. The developers of these early telescopes saw them as useful for observations on Earth, such as for surveying land and conducting military surveillance. Certain pioneering astronomers, however, saw the value of these Dutch prospective classes for revealing the heavens.

Among them was the revolutionary scientist Galileo, Galilei, living in what is now the country of Italy. Galileo heard reports about the new prospective glasses the year after the rival patents were filed in the Netherlands. He immediately came up with his own slightly different version. Soon, Galileo found a way to modify his design so that his telescope magnified objects to eight times their size, rather than just three. This was a necessary improvement if they were to be used to observe objects very far away, like in space.

By the end of that year, he created an instrument that could make objects look 20 times larger than when they were viewed with the naked eye. Eventually, he would succeed in creating a telescope that could magnify 30 times. Galileo was reportedly the first to point his telescope upwards to gaze into the mysteries of the night sky and publish his observations of space. The powerful new instrument allowed Galileo to publish nudity. discoveries, like Jupiter's four largest moons and sunspots on the surface of our sun. Galileo demonstrated his telescope in Venice to great success and was rewarded with a lifetime position as a lecturer.

Galileo's largest telescope had a lens just two inches wide, and even his instruments, which were so much more powerful than those made in the Netherlands, were weak compared to today's incredible technology. But with these rudimentary tools, he made groundbreaking observations. Through his simple telescopes, Galileo observed the Milky Way, that pale band of white that's visible across the sky after the sun sets, and with them he was able to discern that this previously mysterious milky band was actually made up of many individual stars. It wasn't some kind of fog or celestial milk. It's our galaxy. Galileo also turned his scopes on the moon. where he saw mountains and valleys,

though no sign of the fabled man in the moon. His documentation of the lunar landscape countered the common belief of the time that the moon was a perfectly smooth ball. Galileo was able to observe the planet Jupiter and discover its four largest moons as well, which are invisible to human, humanize without help. A rival astronomer, Simon Marius of Germany, also spotted these moons

around the same time, and he gave them the names by which they're known today. He named them Eo, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, after characters from Greek and Roman mythology who were associated with Jupiter, the king of the gods. Following the trail-blazing inventions and observations of Galileo, the Dutch spectacle makers and their contemporaries, many other scientists continued developing new and better telescopes. They came up with ever more powerful ways to magnify celestial objects, and soon they were able to start observing phenomena in the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond. They created larger and stronger telescopes.

With these, they could witness more and more details in space that had formerly been invisible and unsuspected. They uncovered hitherto unknown planets circling our sun. far away from the Earth. For example, at the end of the 1700s, astronomers found the distant planet Uranus. They observed this newly discovered planet and carefully recorded its motion.

In doing so, the scientists noticed that its orbit around the sun was irregular in ways they couldn't fully explain, as they examined its odd orbit, however. They realized that it could be explained if there was an even more distant planet, as yet undiscovered, whose gravity was pulling on Uranus. So some of the scientists set to work, calculating where such an invisible planet, might lie in order to have the gravitational effect they'd observed on Uranus's orbit. Their calculations proved impressively accurate, and sure enough, in 1846,

an astronomer in Berlin observed a brand new planet in just about the spot they'd calculated. The newly discovered planet was named Neptune, After the ancient Roman god of the sea, Neptune was too far away to be seen from Earth without a telescope. It circled the sun in the lonely outskirts of the solar system. We now know that it's an ice giant, a large planet made up of heavy elements surrounded by icy methane clouds. It is so far out in the solar system that, from its vantage point, the sun is a faint and distant light. The sunniest time on Neptune, its high noon, is only about as bright as the dimmest twilight on Earth. It takes the remote planet 164 years to orbit the sun.

so a single twilight Neptune year fills the span of more than a century and a half here on Earth. All this has been revealed by the observations made possible by telescopes, and the same year Neptune was discovered, another astronomer used a homemade telescope to spot the planet's largest moon. It would be more than 100 years, though, before Neptune's other moons were seen by human eyes. Over a century after Neptune's discovery during the 1900s, astronomers used ever-improving telescopes to spot a second moon and a third one orbiting the ice giant. In 1989, an unmanned spacecraft called Voyager 2 approached the planet and photographed it,

beaming the images back to Earth. The Voyager mission went to the far ends of the solar system, observing distant planets, and sending the pictures back to human observers here at home. Scientists knew very little about Neptune before Voyager's observations, because it is so very far away. But with the detailed photos the spaceship sent back, they learned a great deal about the planet, including that it was circled by many moons. Then, even more moons were discovered after the Voyager mission. And in 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope took photos of the 14th moon orbiting Neptune. Now, close to two centuries after humans first laid eyes on the planet, the web telescope

has captured its own image of Neptune, and it's a picture that would surely have astounded and inspired those 19th century discoverers. In the web telescope image, Neptune is a white globe that shines with otherworldly brilliance. It appears translucent, like a delicate ice sculpture, or a fragile ball of frosted glass. Two filmy bands trace an elliptical root,

around the luminous planet. These are Neptune's rings. The image is ethereal and hauntingly lovely. Astronomers say it's also the clearest view humans have ever had of Neptune's rings since the Voyager 2 spacecraft photographed them more than three decades ago. In the image, the planet with the cool, shining white of an ice cave. Ordinarily, Neptune appears slightly blue in color. An effect of methane gas in its atmosphere. A telescope detects light outside the visible spectrum, infrared light that humans can't see with the naked eye. And at those wavelengths, the planet and its moon don't look blue. Instead, the methane gas absorbs the kinds of light that web detects,

causing the planet to appear a nearly transparent white in the web image. Here and there, though, bright spots and streaks shine on the otherwise translucent globe. These are ice clouds in the frigid planet's atmosphere. sphere, reflecting the sun's rays. The planet's filmy rings are dotted with tiny white moons in the web picture and another moon floats nearby. Above Neptune, something shines like a Christmas star outstripping the ghostly planet in brightness.

Rays of light emerge from this shining body, looking just like representations. of the fabled star over Bethlehem, but this is no star. It's Neptune's largest and most unusual moon, Triton. This moon's surface is covered in ice, but it isn't the water ice that we're used to. Instead, Triton is covered in frozen nitrogen, which is extremely reflective. Triton's frozen surface reflects so much of the light that hits it that it appears extremely bright. That brightness originally led astronomers to think Triton was much larger than our own moon, but the observations from Voyager 2 revealed that it's actually slightly smaller. Triton is unusual, in that it orbits Neptune back.

backwards, meaning it circles in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation. This backwards motion is known as a retrograde orbit. Triton is the only large moon in our solar system with such a pattern. This odd orbit provides clues to how Triton evolved in the early days of our solar system. It makes scientists think that Triton formed on its own, away from Neptune's gravity. They speculate that it developed as a kind of baby planet that circled the Sun by itself at first, far in the outer stretches of the solar system. Under this hypothesis, Triton eventually encountered Neptune's gravity and would

slowly pulled into orbit around the ice giant. This process might have taken a billion years or more. The haunting web telescope image of Triton and Neptune was made possible by incredible advances in technology and engineering. These unfolded slowly but steadily in the centuries since Galileo and his peers first pointed their telescopes skyward to begin with new inventions have enabled the telescope to detect light and radiation far beyond that visible to the human eye this allows the web telescope to pick up ancient light that shows the formation of

galaxies and stars when the universe was young the dawn of space travel has has also been key to the evolution of telescopes. An evolution that has culminated, for now, in the deployment of the web instrument, space travel is so crucial to the advancement of telescope technology, because Earth's atmosphere absorbs and distorts light. This somewhat obscures our view of the universe

from the ground. So, Scientists realized that to see the universe without these distortions, they would need a telescope based in space out beyond our atmosphere, and thus the Hubble Space Telescope was conceived. It wasn't the first telescope to go into space. There were light-collecting instruments on missions from the dawn of the space, space age, Apollo 16 astronauts even took a telescope called the far ultraviolet camera

slash spectrograph to the moon in 1972. They brought back 178 frames of film, showing the universe as observed from beyond Earth's atmosphere. The Hubble telescope was, however, the first first great space-based telescope. Astronauts on the space shuttle discovery put the Hubble telescope into orbit around the Earth in 1990. It captured pictures of the universe that advanced scientific knowledge and understanding by leaps and the Hubble telescope was the first of NASA's so-called great observatories. These are several space telescopes that launched the era of space-based observations,

which in turn has led to ever deeper and more awe-inspiring insights into the universe. In 1991, NASA sent its second great observatory into space. That was called the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and it had four telescopes that detected, as you might guess from the name, gamma rays. To understand the term gamma rays, we need to remember that the electromagnetic spectrum encompasses various forms of light.

These include the visible light we can see and other forms like x-rays, radio waves, and microwaves. Gamma rays are those at the highest energy part of the electromagnetic spectrum, outside the range of visible light and close in range to x-rays. Using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, scientists detected gamma rays in space. This enabled them to make various discoveries, including a new category of galaxies with supermassive black holes. The Compton Observatory was decommissioned in the year 2000. But meanwhile, NASA had put another great observatory into orbit. This was the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was carried into space by the Space Shuttle,

Columbia in 1999. Chandra captures images of space by detecting X-rays, which are produced at very high temperatures. such as when stars explode or matter bends towards a black hole, the last of the so-called great observatories hit the skies in 2003. It was the Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer detected infrared light, which we feel as heat, and which is on the other side of the electromagnetic spectrum, from UV light, x-rays, and gamma rays.

The Spitzer Telescope was the first to capture light from a planet beyond our solar system. It also revealed a wispy ring of Saturn, plus the most distant galaxy ever detected. It was also with the Spitzer telescope that observers found the first images of a star system with seven planets of about Earth size called Trappist One. Other space telescopes followed these successes, including the cutting-edge Kepler telescope in 2009 that boasted a four-foot seven-inch mirror. The Kepler scope searched for other planets in our galaxy outside our solar system. These are known as exoplanets. Kepler searched for exoplanets that were too far away to observe directly. It did this using an ingenious technique. When distant planets

pass in front of the stars they orbit, they cause a slight dimming of the star's brightness from our perspective. Kepler detected these dips in the light coming from stars in order to identify far-away exoplanets. NASA used the Kepler telescope to search for Earth-sized planets in what's nicknamed the Goldilocks zone. This is the area around a star

where a planet would be not too hot and not too cold to contain liquid water, which is necessary from life as we know it on Earth. In just six weeks, Kepler enabled the discovery of five exoplanets, which scientists named Kepler 4B, 5B, 6B, 7b and 8b. Not long ago, humans had had no evidence that planets existed anywhere in the universe outside of our own solar system. Then, in a relatively short span of time, the Kepler telescope went on to reveal planets to be commonplace all over the cosmos. Meanwhile, in addition to NASA, other space agencies had gotten into the business of sending

telescopes into space too. In 1995, the European Space Agency collaborated with NASA on the solar and heliosphoric observatory, a mouthful of a name that's known by its acronym. Soho. The Soho spacecraft carries a dozen instruments, including an ultraviolet imaging telescope for observing our sun. In 2001, Sweden, Canada, France, and Finland launched a 43-inch radio telescope aboard a satellite called Odin. The Italian Space Asian launched a craft with a gamma-ray imager in 2007, and other countries launched various missions

in the following years as well. In 2013, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched another space telescope with a mouthful of a name, the extreme ultraviolet spectroscope, for exosphheric dynamics, also known as Hisaki Sprint A. Also in 2013, China put an ultraviolet telescope on the surface of the moon, which is called descriptively the lunar-based ultra-violet telescope. By 2014, the European Space Agency and NASA

had reportedly launched more than 90 space telescopes, though only some of those were still operational. And then, three decades after the launch of the Trailblazing Hubble Telescope, the incredibly powerful web scope took to the heavens. It joined some 28 other telescopes, actively operating in space. The Webb Telescope is a science fiction-like feat of ingenuity and engineering, designed to reveal the cosmos in a glory that Galileo and the ancient observers could only imagine.

The telescope itself is built around a mirror that's more than 21 feet wide, a long way from Galileo's humble two-inch lens, and the telescope is equipped with a huge sun shield, the size of a tennis court, to ward off the sun's rays. This is necessary because the telescope operates without the benefit of a protective atmosphere, unlike telescopes,

located on Earth. The web telescope is so large that there was no rocket big enough to carry it into space intact. Instead, it launched with its mirror and sun shield folded. Then they unfolded out in space. It's an awe-inspiring notion to envision the massive structure drifting to through the near vacuum of open space, majestically unfurling its antennas, its silvery mirror, its massive sun shield. Then the whole structure circling the sun, capturing light from far away and long ago,

building the bank of human knowledge, expanding the frontiers of science, it slowly plums the mysteries of our magnificent universe. What will the coming years of observations bring? What new and beautiful images? What fresh knowledge and discoveries? Forward, what other inventions and technologies will carry human understanding to new levels? For now, We can only ponder those questions. As our ancestors pondered the star-studded skies over their heads, things seems apparent.

The potential may be as limitless as the universe itself.