Today's telescopes employ optics similar to those Galileo and Newton originally used centuries ago. Galileo's simple astronomical telescope will remind you of the spy glasses you'd see in pirate movies or even something you owned as a kid. This refracting telescope uses a main lens at the front called the objective and a lens at the back called the eyepiece. The eyepiece focuses the light from the objective for your eyes. This telescope design is called the refractor or refracting telescope. Sir Isaac Newton designed and built a different type of telescope that used a concave mirror as the primary instead of a lens. Think of the cosmetic mirrors found in many of our homes. The surface is a concave curved shape and as you look at the mirror your face looks larger. Incoming light is reflected from this concave mirror back to the front of the telescope. This telescope design is called the reflector or the reflecting telescope. Different types of reflectors use additional mirrors and lenses. The Newtonian reflector still the most popular telescope used by professional and amateur astronomers today uses a second flat mirror to reflect the image to the side of the telescope. At that point the eyepiece can be used to focus the light much like the refracting telescope. Astronomers don't always look through the microscope. In the place of the eyepiece a number of instruments can be substituted. A camera or charge coupled device can be used to take a photo or image an object. A photo meter will allow the astronomer to determine the amount of light incoming and if that light varies. And a spectroscope can be used to determine the chemical makeup of stars. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, was designed to operate in low Earth orbit. The space shuttle Discovery carried it into space on April 24th 1990. And it will hopefully remain in operation until 2020. A number of aerospace visionaries long dreamed of a space telescope including Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard and Constantine Salkovsky as presented in the rocket to Planetary Space in 1923. In 1946 American astronomer Lyman Spitzer suggested an on-orbit telescope would be superior to an Earth-based telescope due to the fact that an on-orbit telescope would be above the atmosphere. And light pollution. This would allow an orbital telescope to distinguish finer detail and see fainter objects. Hubble's observations and images have produced a new spectacular view of our universe. From our solar system to the fainter objects, Hubble has changed our views of the universe. You