Though it looks like a cardboard tube that got left out in the rain, it's a priceless instrument whose owner changed the world. The mottled brown cylinder on display at The Franklin Institute science museum is a 400-year-old telescope used by Galileo Galilei, whose observations of the heavens ultimately changed the face of not only astronomy but all of science.
"Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy" opens on April 4, Saturday and runs through September 7. The show makes one other stop, in Stockholm, in time for October's Nobel Prize announcements, before the telescope and other items return in January to their home in the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
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Galileo's finger to go on display in Italy
Image: Shown is Galileo Galilei's telescope with his handwritten note specifying the magnifying power of the lens, during a press preview for the Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy exhibition at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Thursday, April 2, 2009. The exhibition is scheduled to open Saturday, April 4.
