In the summer of 1612, Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to our closest star, the Sun, projecting its image safely onto a screen. To his surprise, he found its surface was blotted by small dark ...

From a home observatory in a London house on July 26, 1609, an epic journey began both for exploration, and for the lives of two pioneers: one famous, one not so much. The first known drawing of the ...

Along with countering the geocentric system, Galileo demonstrated that our Moon was not a perfect sphere, as this had also been a long-standing belief. He was the first to deduce the Moon had craters, ...

For more than 80 years, a manuscript drafted by Galileo Galilei was considered “one of the great treasures” of the University of Michigan’s library. That is, until recently, when an expert on the 17th ...

Some of the world’s greatest artists and thinkers have turned to each other for guidance and inspiration: Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Cézanne and ...

One of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions, which appeared to be a Galileo manuscript, is now thought to be the work of a 20th-century forger. By Michael Blanding Galileo ...