Francesco Fontana
Francesco Fontana was an Italian lawyer and an astronomer.
Francesco Fontana studied law at the University of Naples and then he became a lawyer in the court at the Castel Capuano. But failing to always find truth in the Court, he began to study mathematics and astronomy.
He created woodcuts showing the Moon and the planets as he saw them through a self-constructed telescope.
Fontana traced, in 1636, the first drawing of Mars and discovered its rotation.
In February 1646 he published the book Novae coelestium terrestriumq rerum observationes, et fortasse hactenus non vulgatae, where he presented all the observations of the Moon made from 1629 until 1645, the drawings of the bands seen on Jupiter's disc, the strange appearances of Saturn, as well as of the stars of the Milky Way.
With a Fontana's telescope, the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Zupi observed for the first time in 1630 the horizontal bands on the atmosphere of Jupiter and in 1639 the phases of Mercury, an evidence, together with the phases of Venus observed by Galileo in 1610, that the Copernicus's heliocentric theory was correct.
In 1645, he claimed to have observed a satellite of Venus.
He died of plague in Naples with the whole family in July 1656.
The lunar crater Fontana and the crater Fontana on Mars are named in his honor.
Note: See Donato Creti for paintings of planets from the next century.Microscope
Fontana also claimed to have invented the compound microscope in 1618, an invention that has many claimants including Cornelis Drebbel, Zacharias Jansen or his father Hans Martens, and Galileo Galilei.
