History of the telescope
The earliest known telescope appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands when an eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey tried to obtain a patent on one. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the new invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens and by 1655 astronomers such as Christiaan Huygens were building powerful but unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces.
Transient astronomical event
Before the invention of telescopes, events such as these that were visible to the naked eye, from within or near the Milky Way Galaxy, were very rare, and sometimes hundreds of years apart. However, such events were recorded in antiquity, such as the supernova in 1054 observed by Chinese, Japanese and Arab astronomers, and the event in 1572 known as "Tycho's Supernova" after Tycho Brahe, who studied it until it faded after two years. Even though telescopes made it possible to see more distant events, their small fields of view – typically less than 1 square degree – meant that the chances of looking in the right place at the right time were low. Schmidt cameras and other astrographs with wide field were invented in the 20th century, but mostly used to survey the unchanging heavens.