HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN TELESCOPE & listen to the Milky Way
RAMI MANDOW explains how – and why it matters.
I LIVE IN BALMAIN, about two kilometres from the centre of Sydney. I have an optical telescope on the roof, but the lights from the metropolis create a fog that covers the night sky, stealing a large portion of its beauty. I can look at some deeper space objects like globular clusters, binary stars and nebulae, but I’ve found it nearly impossible to catch any faint galaxies.
The lights don’t impact what we’re building in my backyard though. We don’t even need the night sky to look into space: we could do it just as well in bright sunlight. In fact, even the Sun is an object on our target list. What we’re really hoping to catch are the giant clouds of hydrogen gas that are the birthplaces of all stars.
And it’s not just my backyard. We have more than 120 astronomy enthusiasts from Perth to Brisbane participating in the SpaceAusScope project.
Since early January, teams have been building telescopes, with the aim of observing data from the Milky Way by the middle of the year. Along the way we want to test the construction manuals, refine the materials list and find the most efficient way to produce them, then publish our results with the data we collect.
We hope that by prototyping the process then open sourcing our learnings, trials and achievements, future telescope builders will find it easy enough to pick up the instructions and have a go themselves. We also want the data we collect to be used for science – a community of DIY versions of The Dish, spread across Australia and contributing to the knowledge banks of astronomical data.
NOT MUCH SPACE FOR A KID FROM THE SUBURBS
Like most people, I recall only a few things from early childhood. Glimpses and flashes, from a time when adults towered over me in what seemed to be a much simpler world. A world that I questioned, to the dread of my parents, armed with
