Two years later, his son Johannes Fabricius (1587–1615) returned from university in the Netherlands with telescopes that they turned on the Sun.
Despite the difficulties of observing the Sun directly, they noted the existence of sunspots, the first confirmed instance of their observation (though unclear statements in East Asian annals suggest that Chinese astronomers may have discovered them with the naked eye previously, and Fabricius may have noticed them himself without a telescope a few years before).
The pair soon invented camera obscura telescopy so as to save their eyes and get a better view of the solar disk, and observed that the spots moved.
Unfortunately, after Johannes Fabricius' early death at the age of 29, the book remained obscure and was eclipsed by the independent discoveries of and publications about sunspots by Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei, few months later.
[3] After Fabricius denounced a local goose thief from the pulpit at Osteel in 1617, the accused man struck him on the head with a shovel and killed him.