Dark Sky Parks and the International Year of Astronomy

摘要

In 1609 and astronomer Thomas Harriot turned his telescope towards the moon for the very first time and drew the earliest depiction of a celestial object as seen through a telescope. In the autumn of that year Galileo started his own observations of the night sky and as a result, by early 1610 he had formulated his controversial theory that the sun, not the Earth, was not the centre of the universe. Although this heliocentric theory received much criticism, in many ways it can be considered the birth of modern astronomy and a key stage in the development of modern science.