Visual Encyclopedia

For thousands of years, humans have told stories to explain the lights in the night sky. Even the earliest stargazers recognized that many of the objects that they could see behaved differently from each other, but it was in ancient Greece – from around the 6th century BCE – that astronomy began to be systematized. Greek astronomers drew up formal lists of constellations, developed a scale of magnitude to describe the brightness of stars, and made attempts to model the paths of the planets. Following the invention of the telescope in 1608, physical differences between the various objects began to become more apparent, leading to an explosion in scientific knowledge.