History of the telescope History of the telescope The earliest known telescope appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands when an eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey tried to obtain a patent on one. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the new invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens and by
Telecentric lens (or "collimated") illuminators, which produce a parallel light flow, often from LED sources. An image-space (or image-side) telecentric lens produces images of the same size regardless of the distance between the lens and the film or image sensor. This allows the lens to be focused to different distances without changing the size of the image. Image-space telecentric lenses have an exit pupil infinitely far in front of the lens; that is, if one looks in the back of the lens, the image of the aperture is very far away. At the film or image sensor, all of the chief rays