Go out and look at the stars tonight (if it’s not too cold/cloudy), and thank Galileo

The Galilean Revolution, 400 years later | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: “Four hundred years ago tonight, a man from Pisa, Italy took a newly-made telescope with a magnifying power of 33X, pointed it at one of the brighter lights in the sky, and changed mankind forever.

The man, of course, was Galileo, and the light he observed on January 7, 1610 was Jupiter. He spotted ‘three fixed stars’ that were invisible to the eye near the planet, and a fourth a few days later.”

Yay Science.