Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
As a young priest and astronomer in 17th-century Sicily, Giovanni Battista Hodierna trained his gaze on the heavens. He was a disciple of Galileo, and peered through a 20-magnification telescope to track comets slashing across the sky.
Sometime before 1654, he documented what is today called the Lagoon Nebula.He didn’t see it like it appears in the image above, recently captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hodierna’s view was likely akin to what you would see if you looked skyward through binoculars before dawn and studied the area between the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius: something like a smudge or…
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