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40-yr-old telescope made of junk most powerful in world
Published on Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 17:26 in 
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STARRY EYED: It will take $2 million to get the Mikhail's telescope working well again.
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New Delhi: Tucked away in a corner of busy Siberia is an aluminium dome on a rickety wooden tower. Four decades old, it's a telescope built by world war soldier, Mikhail Levchenko, in his free time. What's interesting is the way he built it.
Amateur astronomer, Oleg Petrov says, "He collected everything from rubbish bins - nuts, bolts, metal parts - stuff people threw away. The telescope's steering mechanism is from an old abandoned car. Imagine that! And everything works perfectly."
Another amateur astronomer, Mikhail Makarov says, "It could magnify things 500 times their original size. It was the biggest telescope in the entire region. Even the Russian Academy of Sciences didn't have such a large telescope."
Mikhail died a long time back. For years, his backyard telescope lay unused and thieves even tried to sell it as scrap. But now, his neighbors and relatives are bringing it back to life. His passion for the stars, they say, has somehow, rubbed off on them.
Mikhail Levchenko's daughter, Nadezhda says, "He wanted to bring the stars closer, to see the huge moon properly, to see Saturn's ring. He adored the sky, he was obsessed with it, it was his thing."
It will take $2 million to get the rig working well again. That's a lot of money for what was once junk. But Mikhail's neighbors say it will be worth it and they want to watch the sky through an old friend's eyepeice.
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