The Working Telescope

For this contest, I decided to build a telescope. But building a display model wasn't enough, I wanted to do a telescope that people could actually use to look at the Moon, the planets, the stars.

How does it work ?

There's a light brick hidden inside the tube of the telescope, which is activated when you press the lens. The light passes through a decorated window (it can be either a sticker or a printed element in the final set), a pair of magnifying glasses, bounces on a mirror (which would be a flat tile with a chrome silver sticker), so when you look through the eyepiece, you can see what you could see if you looked through an actual telescope.

The decorations were made by my friend ThisStuds. There's a galaxy, the Moon and Jupiter with is moons, which are a reference to the inventor of the telescope, Galileo Galilei, and the Solis Magna system, as a nod to the BIONICLE universe.

Despite its big size (18 x 29 x 34 cm), the model is made of 231 pieces.