First, he made a version of the Galilean telescope, the model the famous Italian astronomer used to observe the moon and sunspots.

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He then examined a picture taken by the Hubble space telescope of a galaxy several billion light-years away.

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Online he met Steven Lee, the chief telescope operator at a professional observatory in Coonabarabran, Australia.

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Then Mandel works his magic: Using an ultrasensitive digital camera attached to the back of a telescope and wired into a computer, he starts to pull images down from the heavens.

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He is particularly excited by the prospect of being able to dedicate a large telescope to the search for supernovae, since these are used as intergalactic yardsticks by astronomers.

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He would really have appreciated the work that went into making the main mirror on Esa's telescope - itself a technological wonder.

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In the book, Sirtori describes a meeting with an aged spectacle maker called Juan Roget in Gerona who he described as the real inventor of the telescope.

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Mr. MAX MUTCHLER (Space Telescope Science Institute): About the middle of June, he gave it to me, and within a day, I discovered these two new moons.

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