Silent harmony: astronomy at the Royal Society 

Galileo’s Starry Messenger was the first published work to incorporate scientific observations made using a telescope.

The treatise contains descriptions of lunar landscapes, new stars in well-known constellations and the major satellites of Jupiter.

Galileo designed and built the most powerful telescope of his generation.

His own instrument, a thirty-power magnifier preserved at the Museo Galileo in Florence, served as model to other instrument-makers for many years.

The temporary installation of instruments at Gresham College gave way to a permanent home for astronomy with the creation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

Greenwich became the home of the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed FRS (1646-1719).

Later, the Royal Society commissioned many instruments to observe the Transit of Venus events of 1761 and 1769.

Some were made by the instrument-maker James Short (1710-1768) who encouraged the development of the achromatic reflecting telescope.

The Royal Society also owns a reflecting telescope made by Newton as a direct application of his theories on light and colour.

The instrument allowed him to make various observations conclusive with his theories on gravity.

The instrument-makers Troughton & Simms made telescopes, mural circles - telescopes mounted on circular frames - and many other astronomy tools.

Spectroscopes, like this one, allowed astronomers to deduce the chemical composition of stars by studying their spectral lines.

In 1845, a giant reflecting telescope was built at Parsonstown in Ireland by Royal Society President William Parson, Third Earl of Rosse (1800-1867) - standing in the aperture in this photo.

The telescope was known as Leviathan, and was the largest in the world until 1917.

Leviathan had a 72-inch aperture and was particularly suited to light-gathering, for the observation of very distant objects.

The telescope revealed the spiral structures of what we now know to be other galaxies.

The Victorian era saw astronomy become popular with the burgeoning middle classes.

James Glaisher FRS (1809-1903), a meteorologist and astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, edited various books to popularise astronomy, and was heavily criticised by his chief, the prickly Astronomer Royal George Airy FRS (1801-1892).

Solar prisms allow for the safe observation of the sun by refracting most of the light out of the optical path.

This reflecting prism was purchased with the support of a Royal Society grant.

It was used with a spectroheliograph by the astronomer John Evershed FRS (1864-1956) for solar observations at his private observatory in Ewhurst, Surrey.

The prism was then employed at the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceaux Castle in 1953.

Traditional astronomical expeditions continued to be valuable into the twentieth century. Photographs of star positions during the 1919 solar eclipse taken on Principe Island by Arthur Eddington FRS (1882-1944) and Frank Dyson FRS (1868-1939) provided key evidence for Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The Hubble Telescope, soon to be replaced by the James Webb space telescope (expected late 2019), has provided breathtaking images of our universe that Galileo could never have imagined.