Most people consider the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei to be the father of telescopic astronomy, although a lesser-known English physicist named Thomas Harriot may actually have been the first to observe the Moon through a lens. Born in 1560, Harriot attended Oxford University before being employed by the English statesman and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh to teach astronomy and navigation to sea captains. Soon after his release, Harriot turned his attention skywards, producing a map of the Moon as seen through a telescope on July 26, 1609. Harriot’s notebooks also contain the earliest known drawings of sunspots as seen through a telescope – dated to December 1610 – although once again, his failure to publish this work enabled Galileo to get in there first. Still, it wasn’t really until the 20th century that historians took a proper look at these, by which time Galileo’s name was firmly etched in the record books as the first person to observe the Moon – and many other celestial bodies – through a telescope.