The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

Besides, the discoveries announced in the Star Messenger were not quite as original as they pretended to be. He was neither the first, nor the only scientist, who had turned a telescope at the sky and discovered new wonders with it. Thomas Harriot made systematic telescopic observations and maps of the moon in the summer of 1609, before Galileo, but he did not publish them. Even the Emperor Rudolph had watched the moon through a telescope before he had heard of Galileo. Galileo’s star maps were so inaccurate that the Pleiades group can only be identified on them with difficulty, the Orion group not at all; and the huge dark spot under the moon’s equator, surrounded by mountains, which Galileo compared to Bohemia, simply does not exist.