Boy builds telescope that can observe the surface of the Moon, with only wires and a few cans of soft drink

Malick Ndiaye, a 12-year-old boy born in Senegal, West Africa, used some old high-magnification glasses his father used, camera lenses, wires, paper, cans and sticks to make their own telescopes.

With all these "resources" available, the African boy built a telescope that allowed himself to observe the night sky and the details of the Moon's surface.

"It took me two weeks to build the telescope," the boy in the NASA polo explained in a report to Spanish media El País. "When I focused on the night sky and saw the details of the Moon's surface, it seemed like I could touch it with my own hands."

Malick Ndiaye was able to build a telescope that works out of wire and cans due to the boy's interest in space and astronomy, and thanks to reading a book called "The Whole Universe", related to space and the stars.

After information about this boy was posted and spread, in addition to scientists, journalists also approached Senegal to learn more about this boy's story.

Maram Kaire, the current president of the Senegalese Association for the Promotion of Astronomy, went to Malick Ndiaye's home and entrusted him with another, more professional telescope that would allow the young man to delve deeper into the observations. his space.

In fact, if we take the time to learn and add a little dexterity, any of us can build our own telescope, and moreover this has also been mentioned in physics. 11th grade.

The first written record of a telescope came from the Netherlands in 1608, in a patent filed by Middelburg eyeglass manufacturer Hans Lippershey to the Dutch Parliament on 2 October 1608 for his eyeglasses. he "for being able to see things far away as if they were near".

A few weeks later, another Dutch eyewear manufacturer named Jacob Metius also filed for a patent. However, the Dutch Parliament did not grant patents to either because knowledge of the device seems to have been common before, but the Dutch government awarded Lippershey a contract for design copies. your.

The early Dutch telescopes were composed of a convex and a concave lens - telescopes built this way did not invert the image, and in early designs it had only Magnification is 3X only.

Soon after, the telescope was mass-produced in the Netherlands in large numbers and it quickly became popular throughout Europe.

And also from these early designs, Galileo improved and applied it to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how to make a much more useful telescope with a convex objective and a convex eyepiece lens. By 1655, astronomers like Christiaan Huygens had built the much more powerful but unwieldy Kepler telescope with paired eyepieces.

Isaac Newton is considered to be the first person to create a reflecting telescope in 1668 with a design consisting of a small diagonal plane mirror used to reflect light to an eyepiece attached to the edge of the glass. In 1672, Laurent Cassegrain proposed a design of a reflector with a small convex secondary mirror reflecting light through the central hole of the primary mirror.

Achromatic lenses, which greatly reduce chromatic aberrations in the objective and allow for shorter and better performing telescopes, first appeared on the 1733 telescope built by Chester Moore Hall, but he did not publish it. John Dollond became aware of Hall's invention and began mass production of telescopes using this lens, starting in 1758.

Important developments in reflecting telescopes were John Hadley's production of larger parabolic mirrors in 1721; glass mirror silvering process introduced by Léon Foucault in 1857; and the application of very durable aluminum coatings on the reflector in 1932.

The Ritchey-Chretien variant of the Cassegrain reflector was invented around 1910, but was not widely accepted until after 1950; Many modern telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope use this design, providing a wider field of view than the classic Cassegrain telescope.

The era of radio telescopes (along with radio astronomy) was born with Karl Guthe Jansky's accidental discovery of astronomical radio sources in 1931. Various types of telescopes were developed over the century. 20 for a wide range of wavelengths from radio to gamma rays. The development of space observatories after 1960 allowed access to some wavelengths that could not be observed from the ground, including X-rays and the infrared with longer wavelengths.