The person who invented the telescope earlier than Galileo

The year 2009 was declared the "International Year of Astronomy" by the United Nations to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope for astronomical observations. Recently, scientists from the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy, hope to exhume the remains of Galileo from his tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce to examine his DNA, in order to understand how this great 17th-century astronomer was able to put forward so many groundbreaking cosmological theories while gradually losing his eyesight.