How did Galileo use the Earths moon to support the Heliocentric model??
Hi Michael! Galileo’s observations of the moon tended to support the heliocentric theory in an indirect way. Galileo owned the best telescope in the world at that time. When he pointed it to the moon, he was able, for the first time, to see mountains and craters. He could make out shadows on the lunar surface. The unexpected thing about lunar mounatins was not so much that they cast shadows. That could easily have been predicted from Ptolemy’s theory, that the earth is in the center and everything revolved around us. Rather, it was the very fact of surface features at all. Most people imagined that celestial bodies were perfect, or at least quite unlike earth. This, it was supposed, is what makes earth different. When Galileo demonstrated that the moon has mountains and rough terrain like the earth, he showed that there was no longer a reason for anyone to think earth unique. In other words, by his observations of the moon, he indirectly supported the heliocentric model. By the way, se
