This is  one of our  extraordinarily beautiful ,leather bound, embossed gold leaf decorated,  replica of one of Galileo's  original  telescope, inv #2428  which is located at the IMSS in Florence Italy.  Our  telescopes are   very precise  high grade museum quality clones based on our exhaustive measurements of the originals and our extensive  research of the literature.  We have hand crafted them in every detail using ,wherever possible, the techniques representative of the 1600's. This includes the novel strip and layer construction used by Galileo and his assistances. This instrument is  covered  with a combination of red, brown and black leather, goat and calf skin.  It is composed of over 100 pieces  of box wood strips and  is decorated with embossed gold foil figures of dolphins flowers vines, etc.. There  are  over   400 gilding  strikes making up the gold decorations requiring 19 individual hot stamp dies. The dies of these stamps were very carefully designed using nearly 100 close up photos at various angles  of the art work on the original. We  also took the time and effort to replicated many of the irregularities in these decorations that were found on the original telescope. 

The dimensions in length and width are within 1% of the original. The cross sections along its  length were determined using a novel   amplification technique that we developed gaining (a six times improvement ) of the first derivative of the profile and thus  an accuracy  of better than 1% in diameter versus length. This helped us  get very good estimate of the  dimensions of the conical sections at the objective end of the instrument. 

The orginal instrument IMSS #2428 was built for a very high ranking individual and Galileo demonstrated that he would would spend  a substantial amount of money, time designing and  decorating  a telescope  for marketing purposes. To sum it up; this telescope represents not only an advancement in technology but also a balanced expression of a beautiful work of art of that time period and equally today. In at least two way this instrument is better than  the  original! First because it is more readily available than the original  and second because it  precisely shows  what the original would have looked like and felt like when it was new.

We believe that Galileo would have been pleased and would have indorsed our telescopes. For those that  have one they can be proud to own and display it because it demonstrate the two most important  aspect of the endeavors of science  which are  "its accuracy and honesty". Something that most people in the U.S.A. are almost completely unaware of when they judge the value of science and those who work in it.