He gathered pupils round him however, and taught them how to work the lenses, so that gradually these instruments penetrated Europe, and astronomers everywhere verified his splendid discoveries.
But still he worked on, and by March in the very next year, he saw something still more hateful to the Aristotelian philosophers, viz. spots on the sun.
Fig. 48.
If anything was pure and perfect it was the sun, they said. Was this impostor going to blacken its face too?
Well, there they were. They slowly formed and changed, and by moving all together showed him that the sun rotated about once a month.
Before taking leave of Galileo's astronomical researches, I must mention an observation made at the end of 1612, that the apparent triplicity of Saturn ([Fig. 46]) had vanished.