Vietnamese mid-teens make telescope from everyday objects

Three Vietnamese students from a middle school in central Vietnam’s rural region are working on improvements to an astronomical telescope they have made to enter a national innovation contest in a Mekong Delta city later this month.

The telescope was created from PVC pipes, make-up mirrors, and even toy car wheels and is said to be able to magnify an object by 72 times.

They said that the moon surface and faraway stars can be seen through their reflecting telescope that earned ninth-graders Vo Thanh Dat, Le Hoai Bao, and Do Huu Ngoc Tan a second prize at an innovation competition, where no first prizes were awarded, in Khanh Hoa Province last month.

The three mid-teens, enrolled at Nguyen Du Middle School in a rural commune of the province’s Dien Khanh District, are working to upgrade their tool in preparation for a similar contest at the national level, to be held in Can Tho City at the end of this month.

Dat was the one to come up with the idea and persuade his two other classmates to create the telescope.

“Our telescope can magnify the image of an object by 72 times”, Dat said.

“I failed to make a convergent telescope with plastic pipes and lenses a couple of years ago as it did not display clear images,” Dat recollected.

“I thought of reviving the equipment and asked Bao and Tan to join me when our school notified its students of a provincial innovation contest in July last year,” he said.

In addition to their limited knowledge of astronomy and physics, there is no observatory or society of astronomy lovers in Khanh Hoa, so the trio was confronted by enormous challenges in the first place.

They resorted to the Internet for a richer understanding of the subjects and making friends with astronomy aficionados in big centers like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City to gain experiences. 

It took the students more than two months to create the telescope, 140 millimeters in diameter and 900 millimeters in length, with the body made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipes, its stand modified from that of a goniometer in the school lab, and the supporting frame made by a carpenter. 

The lens system is composed of mirrors and lenses they bought from Ho Chi Minh City, including one make-up mirror. 

“The very hard part for us was the magnification system because the parachute cords we initially used could not stand the great friction when they were pulled hard to magnify or reduce images,” Bao recalled. “We finally got over this problem by utilizing a serrated wheel extracted from a CD drive and two other wheels from toy cars.”

The most disappointing moment was when the three boys saw nothing through the tool when it was fully assembled.

Dat, Bao, and Tan then had to dismantle the telescope and put its parts together many times before it properly worked for the first time.

“We can now observe the surface of the moon and other stars far away from the earth through our telescope,” Dat eagerly said. “We feel happy when our friends like it and look at the stars out there with the very tool.”