Galileo

Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer in the 1600s. Galileo was alive when the telescope was invented, and quickly took advantage of the primitive stages of this pivotal invention, building his own and getting to work studying the sky. He was the first person to lay eyes on the Rings of Saturn, and named some of the moons of Jupiter. He also stuck with the ‘planets rotating around the sun’ philosophy. Unlike others, however, he had hard evidence. He studied Venus for a timed period and made calculations about its phases that said it had to orbit the sun. The Church disagreed, and so he was forced to live the rest of his eight years of life under house arrest near Florence, before he died.