> The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.

> The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.