Anton Maria Schyrleus of Rheita

Anton Maria Schyrleus of Rheita, also written Schyrl or Schyrle (1604 to 1660), was an astronomer and optician who developed several inverting and erecting eyepieces and made the telescope of Kepler's design. He wrote that things appear more alive with the binocular telescope, doubly as exact and as large and bright, and his binocular telescope is the precursor of modern binoculars. Two accounts of his early life exist. The popular one makes him a Czech priest and Capuchin friar at Rheita in Bohemia, born in 1597, who left the order at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 and settled in Belgium. The more probable account has him born in 1604 in Reutte, Austria, joining the Augustine order in 1622 and attending the university at Ingolstadt, where he probably followed astronomy courses and learned to grind lenses, then entering the Capuchins, who sent him to Linz in 1636 to teach philosophy. There he served the archbishop of Trier and Speyer, who was held captive by Emperor Ferdinand III, and was banned from the emperor's lands in 1641 after a diplomatic mission to Pope Urban VIII was taken as spying. In the 1640s he was professor of philosophy at Trier and in 1642 observed in Cologne.