Malick Ndiaye, a 12-year-old boy from Senegal, West Africa, has crafted his own telescope using some old high-magnification glasses that his father used, along with camera lenses, wires, paper, cans, and sticks.
With all these available “resources,” this African boy was able to build a telescope that allowed him to observe the night sky and the details of the Moon’s surface.
“I spent two weeks building the telescope“, the boy explained in a report to the Spanish media outlet El País. “When I focused on the night sky and saw the details of the Moon’s surface, it felt like I could touch it with my own hand“.
Malick Ndiaye was able to create a functioning telescope solely with wires and cans due to his interest in the universe and astronomy, as well as by reading a book titled “The Whole Universe,” which relates to space and stars.
After news of this boy spread, not only scientists but also journalists traveled to Senegal to learn more about his story.
Maram Kaire, the current president of the Senegalese Astronomy Promotion Association, visited Malick Ndiaye’s home and presented him with a more professional telescope that will allow the young boy to conduct deeper space observations.
In fact, with some research and a little craftsmanship, anyone can build their own telescope, a concept that was also mentioned in the 11th-grade physics curriculum.
The first recorded mention of a telescope comes from the Netherlands in 1608, in a patent submitted by Hans Lippershey, a spectacle maker from Middelburg, to the Dutch Parliament on October 2, 1608, for his eyeglasses “because they allow one to see distant objects as if they were near.” Weeks later, another Dutch spectacle maker named Jacob Metius also applied for a patent. However, the Dutch Parliament did not grant patents to either because the knowledge of this device seemed to have been known previously; nevertheless, the Dutch government awarded Lippershey a contract for copies of his design. The original telescopes from the Netherlands were constructed with a convex lens and a concave lens—telescopes made this way did not invert the image, and in the early designs, the magnification was only 3X. Shortly after, telescopes were mass-produced in the Netherlands in large quantities and quickly became popular throughout Europe. From these original designs, Galileo made improvements and applied them to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how to create a much more useful telescope with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens. By 1655, astronomers like Christiaan Huygens had developed much more powerful Kepler telescopes, though they were difficult to use with the eyepiece being attached. Isaac Newton is regarded as the first to create a reflecting telescope in 1668, with a design that included a small diagonal flat mirror used to reflect light to an eyepiece attached to the side of the telescope. In 1672, Laurent Cassegrain proposed a design for a reflecting telescope with a secondary convex mirror that reflects light through the center hole of the primary mirror. The achromatic lens, which significantly reduced chromatic aberration in the objective lens and allowed for shorter and better-performing telescopes, first appeared in a telescope in 1733, created by Chester Moore Hall, but he did not publish it. John Dollond became aware of Hall’s invention and began producing telescopes using this lens in large quantities starting in 1758. Key developments in reflecting telescopes included John Hadley’s production of larger parabolic mirrors in 1721; the silvering process for mirror glass proposed by Léon Foucault in 1857; and the application of durable aluminum coatings on reflecting mirrors in 1932. The Ritchey-Chretien variant of the Cassegrain reflecting mirror was invented around 1910 but was not widely accepted until after 1950; many modern telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, utilize this design, providing a wider field of view than traditional Cassegrain telescopes. The era of radio telescopes (along with radio astronomy) began with Karl Guthe Jansky’s accidental discovery of astronomical radio sources in 1931. Many types of telescopes were developed in the 20th century for a range of wavelengths from radio to gamma rays. The development of space observatories after 1960 allowed access to some wavelengths that cannot be observed from the ground, including X-rays and longer wavelength infrared. |
