Telescope earliest existing record of a telescope was a 1608 patent submitted to the government in the Netherlands by Middelburg spectacle maker Hans Lippershey for a refracting telescope. The actual inventor is unknown but word of it spread through Europe. [[Galileo Galilei|Galileo]] heard about it and, in 1609, built his own version, and made his telescopic observations of celestial objects. The idea that the [[Objective (optics)|objective]], or light-gathering element, could be a mirror instead of a lens was being investigated soon after the invention of the refracting telescope. The potential advantages of using [[parabolic reflector|parabolic mirrors]]—reduction of [[spherical aberration]] and no
Hans Lippershey (55 Cancri d) are named after him. English speakers tend to interpret the letters 'sh' in the name as representing a single phoneme, the sibilant <nowiki>[</nowiki>ʃ, resulting in a pronunciation like . Both in German and in Dutch, however, the letters 's' and 'h' belong to different syllables and are pronounced separately. The German pronunciation is , whereas the Dutch pronunciation is closer to . Hans Lippershey Hans Lippershey (1570 – buried 29 September 1619), also known as Johann Lippershey or Lipperhey, was a German-Dutch spectacle-maker. He is commonly associated with the invention of the telescope, because he was the