The earliest map of the moon

In 1609, several months before Galileo recorded his observations of the moon's features, an Englishman named Thomas Harriot used telescopes to create the drawing above.

Harriot’s very first recording was made using an elegant hand-held device, known as the “Dutch trunke” telescope, which was only six times more powerful than the naked eye. It would have shown a small pinpoint of sky, much like looking through a kaleidoscope, and Harriot would have had to inch the telescope across the sky, recording as he went...

By 1613 he had a telescope with a magnification of 36 times, and was able to record some of the most striking features of the solar system including Jupiter’s spot, Saturn’s rings and the dark sunspots that we now know correspond to magnetic activity on the Sun’s surface...

For comparison...