Abstract
Everybody knows famous painter Leonardo da Vinci's »Mona Lisa«.
Many people know, that he had the idea to develop military equipment like forts, canons, tanks, submarines, helicopters.
But there is a zone of avoidance around his scientific work on themes later published by Fermat, Snellius, Newton, Galilei. The latter heard from the existence of an optical system, that enlarges far distant objects. 100 years before Galilei (in 1609/10) found out the existence of the Jovian moons Leonardo da Vinci wrote into his scrapbook (1508): »Make glasses to see the moon greater«. So it is he, who designed, constructed and used a telescope for the first time and he introduced it to astronomical applications and reported on the results.
Html-Version: Wolfgang R. Dick. Created: 22 Jan 1999