Why We Watch the Skies

Inspiring essay, though I'm not sure he has all his facts straight.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

[quote="ToSeek"]Why We Watch the Skies

We watch for the same reason that we visit this board - we love to be inspired. :

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My initials are on the moon, my name is on Mars and Earth is my planet of origin.

Here's one he didn't:

"When spectroscopes were attached to telescopes, astronomers were able to discover the compositions, temperatures, brightness, and, eventually, distances of the stars."

Spectroscopes weren't used to make any insterstellar distance measurements at first. Trigonometic parallax was. True, later generations were able to apply so-called "spectroscopic parallax" techniques to guesstimate the intrinsic luminosity of known star types (and hence the distances to these stars), but these guesstimations are all built upon trigonometric parallax measurements to nearby "example" starts of their type.

Is this one accurate?:

His work (Galileo), with that of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, demonstrated that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system and that the stars were not lights on a celestial sphere but suns like our own in a vast ocean of space.

Was there anything specific in the work of any of these great astronomers that scientifically demonstrated that the stars must be other Sun's? The stars were still at a single fixed distance in the model of Copernicus.