Happy Birthday Newton
Sir Isaac Newton was born today 4 January in the year 1643. So 376 years ago as I figure it. A mad Englishman. He lived to be 84 years old, and he is buried in Westminster Abbey. In later life he got pretty eccentric, and after his death it was found that his remains contained massive amounts of mercury. This may have been from his experiments in alchemy.
He is credited with a lot of things, but probably designing and building the first reflector telescope (as opposed to a refractor, as in eyeglasses or a pair of binoculars) is his most famous accomplishment. His first really usable and practical reflector telescope had a six inch reflector. There are significant advantages and disadvantages to each type, but the small size and its inherent ability to overcome chromatic aberration are two of the greatest advantages of using a reflector in a telescope. 
In photography the same advantages hold true in using a reflector, but the disadvantages are immense. Very unattractive bokeh (the portions of the picture which are out of focus) a flat appearance, and washed out colors.
Today I have an eight inch reflector telescope. The science of optics has greatly improved during the last couple of hundred years, and today the clarity and resolution one gets from a light bucket like an eight inch reflector is really amazing. I can spend hours peering through this telescope.
But if I want to use the telescope to take photographs, I prefer a refractor. I took this picture of the moon (and later filled in the names of some of the things that are visible). I used a 60 mm (just slightly more than 2 inches) refractor telescope as the camera lens to take this picture. I took the lens off the camera, removed the eyepiece from the telescope, and directly connected the camera to the telescope. So in this type of setup the front lens (objective) of the telescope becomes the actual camera lens. I used a Nikon D40 camera.
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Newton was also an excellent mathematician and physicist. In later years he was head of the Royal Mint, viciously going after counterfeiters and also served in Parliament. His only recorded comments as a member of Parliament were to complain about the cold draft and ask that the window be closed.
Back then science was all tied up with religion, so it was risky for a scientist to claim that the earth rotated around the sun. The Christian holy men said that everything rotated around the earth, and if you disagreed with them you could be sent to jail or worse.
This is sort of like the fundamentalist Islamic clerics of today. Of course George Bush got religion and politics all tied together too, despite the fact that one of the very most basic foundations of America is separation of church and state.
So today although living in the past is clearly more identified with the Muslim religion, the Christians also are guilty. I guess the Jews and Buddhists are probably guilty too.
Happy Birthday Sir Isaac.
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