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David Malin: Hello, my name's David Malin. I was a photographer, astronomical photographer with the Anglo-Australian Observatory for twenty-six years but I retired in 2001 so I'm now kind of an outsider.

But I want to talk to you today about imaging in the broader sense not just astronomical imaging. I want to talk to you about the importance of images in understanding Science ...

and how useful they are in showing you complex ideas that are easy to absorb.

There was a time however when images were not widely available, most people didn't have books and of course there was no internet four hundred years ago.

And it's four hundred years ago that I want to talk about because in 1609 Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope to the sky and began to wonder about it.

The telescope had only been invented a short time before, a year or so before and he heard down the intellectual grapevine that was Europe at that time in the Renaissance ...

if you put two lenses together in a certain way in an optic tube you can make things look closer.

That was thought to be a really good way to spot enemy ships before they came to attack you or if you lived in Venice,

which was a maritime nation to be able to see trading ships coming in before your competitors could so you could go and do good deals with them.

So, the telescope had practical uses and Galileo knew about those and exploited them but he also turned his telescope to the sky and looked at the stars and the Moon ...

and the planets and made some discoveries in a few months in 1609 that completely changed our view of the universe.

And it's those discoveries and the way that they changed things that I want to talk about today.

The talk is beyond vision because we're talking about looking at things that are normally beyond our visual ability to see.

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