Have a new phone, a Sony android one, no idea about most of its capabilities but do know it has a good camera, 10+ megapixels I believe. However unlike my basic digital camera it doesn’t seem to have a zoom-lens capability. Zoom lens, to me, is like a simple optical telescope.
For thousands of years humans studied the ‘heavens’ without the aid of optical magnification. All sorts of evidence that early civilisations were very observant of the day and night skies, studying them perhaps more intently than the surface of the planet which just provided for their basic needs.
The only constellation (these being man-made constructs formed by arrangements of random stars when viewed from Earth) I ever learned to identify in the night sky was the ‘Plough’ (maybe reflecting agricultural origins (see Family History ‘Publication’). So how could early civilisations have been so informed about celestial things? One answer is that most human habitation in the 21st century is subject to a high degree of artificial light pollution (seen as a yardstick of technological progress) while another is that some climates result in more frequent cloud cover than others. Thinking people in the past then had an advantage.
The Polish canon of the Roman Catholic Church, diplomat and polymath (1473-1543) observed the ‘heavens’ without the aid of an optical telescope (invented later) but by careful observation and recording was able to come up with a heliocentric (Sun centre) concept of the Solar System as against the geocentric concept as promoted by Aristotle and in the Book of Genesis.
Galileo, also, like Copernicus, a devout Catholic also challenged a literal acceptance of Biblical text. Picture shows the telescope he made.
To be continued.