Book Review: A History of Telescopes

Abstract

A HISTORY OF TELESCOPES 400 Years of Astronomical Telescopes: A Review of History, Science and Technology. Edited by Bernhard Brandi, Remdo Stuik and Jeannette Katgert-Merkelijn (Springer, Dordrecht, 2010). Pp. xvi + 535. $179. ISBN 978-90-481-2232-5.This wonderful book, with experts describing telescopes and related astronomical facilities from before Galileo into the twenty-first century, will stand the test of time. The series of articles are from a conference held in Leiden in 2008 to mark the oncoming International Year of Astronomy. As the conference organizer Bernhard Brandi writes in his preface, almost all the invited speakers accepted, making the conference important indeed for the history of astronomy.The 104 pages in the section on the History of Optical Telescopes begins with Albert Van Helden starting with Lipperhey, Giorgio Strano describing the details of Galileo's own telescopes, and Jim Bennett bringing us up to Lord Rosse. James Lequeux discusses the great nineteenth-century refractors. Leiden Observatory, where the conference was held, was founded in 1633, making it 380 years old. My own Hopkins Observatory of Williams College, the oldest in the United States, was founded 175 years ago, making it almost half as old. We gave Alvan Clark his start, commissioning him to build us a telescope, his first, installed here in 1852, though his 7 starter refractor doesn't rival his 40 magnum opus, listed along with other large refractors in a four-page table in Lequeux's entry. David DeVorkin and Patrick McCray then bring us through the increasingly bigger reflectors of the twentieth century.The 117 pages in the section on the History of Non-Optical Telescopes present Woody Sullivan on radio telescopes, George Rieke on infrared telescopes, Riccardo Giacconi on x-ray telescopes, Klaus Pinkau on gamma-ray telescopes, Heinrich Volk and Konrad Bemlohr on higher-energy gamma-ray telescopes (the only entry with colour photographs), Oskar von der Luhe on solar telescopes, and Atsuto Suzuki and Masatoshi Koshiba on neutrino telescopes. It is too bad that there is no way of keeping this volume continually updated with, for example, the 2013 report of extremely high energy neutrinos detected with the IceCube array buried in Antarctic ice.The 60 pages in the following section include a miscellany of Eric H0g on astrometry (as we await the launching of Gaia to supersede the Tycho catalogue from Hipparcos that H0g supervised), Malcolm Longair on historical case studies including the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for which we celebrate its centenary in 2014, Detlev Koschny on amateur telescopes, and C. R. [Bob] O'Dell with a behind-the-scenes history of how the Hubble Space Telescope came to be. (In section V, Martin Harwit continues the story with the unofficial history of NASA's continued program called Great Observatories.)In the 124-page section on Fundamental Telescope Technologies we learn from Lothar Noethe about telescope mirrors from casting to adaptive optics, Pierre Lena more about adaptive optics, Jason Spyromilio about telescope mounts and domes, Andreas Quirrenbach about the history of astronomical interferometry, Ian Robson and Harry van der Laan about submillimetre telescopes (though the opening of ALMA is too recent to be included), James Cordes about future radio telescopes including plans for SKA, Bernd Aschenbach about x-ray telescope design and performance, and Neil Gehrels and John Cannizzo about gamma-ray telescopes. …