Astronomy is experiencing a golden age, with a new generation of innovative telescopes yielding a flood of information on the Universe. This book traces the development of telescopes from Galileo to the present day, and explains the basic principles of telescopes that operate in different parts of electromagnetic spectrum.

• 1: Galileo opens the sky


• 2: The big reflecting telescopes


• 3: How to build bigger telescopes


• 4: Stretching the spectrum: Infrared and ultraviolet.


• 5: Into Space


• 6: X-rays


• 7: Gamma rays and cosmic rays


• 8: Radio telescopes


• 9: Pairs and arrays


• 10: Millimetre waves and spectral lines


• 11: Opening the cosmos


• 12: Then, now, and tomorrow


• Further reading


• Index

Sir Francis Graham Smith is a distinguished pioneer of radio astronomy. He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1975 to 1977, and was appointed Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1976, where he was involved in setting up the Northern Hemisphere Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Island. He was the thirteenth Astronomer Royal, serving from 1982 to 1990, and Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society from 1988 to 1994.
Awards for his work include the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (1987) and a knighthood in 1986. He also written several books, most recent of which is Unseen Cosmos, on the story of radio astronomy, published by OUP in 2014.