Galileo's scope

Mark wrote in
:

Considering you can spend 200squids on a telescope and just manage to
see a single ring around Saturn, and some of the moons as dots, which
is Galileo saw some centuries ago, I'm assuming that whilst he
obviously benefitted from next to no light pollution, he must have had
some nifty optics for the time?

Just pointing out that Galileo's scope didn't show Saturn's rings. He just
saw what he thought were handles on either side of the planet. BTW light
polution doesn't have any real bearing on this. We are talking about
planets here (which are bright) not DSO's. Any cheap achromat you can buy
probably gives better views than Galileo's scope. Christiaan Huygens was
the first to correctly identify the Saturn's ring as such.

Klazmon.