Very Short Introduction: Telescopes

Meet the authors of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series of books.
Modern materials and computer technology allow telescopes to range from large Earth-based optical telescopes and radio arrays linking up across continents, to space-based
telescopes capturing the Universe in infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. Discover how all of them peer back in time and owe their development to Galileo’s observations of the familiar moons of Earth and Jupiter.

Geoff Cottrell is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He began his career as
a radio astronomer at Cambridge, observing colliding galaxies, and later worked on magnetically confined plasmas that are hotter than the centre of the Sun.