The Telescope

Whatever the weather or time of day, you can now explore the "night sky" from the comfort of your living room with this working LEGO telescope model.

The build itself features a large red telescope which uses 2 minifigure magnifying glasses as lenses to create a magnified and inverted image just like a real thing.

The telescope can be rotated through 360˚, elevated to about 45˚ and moved back and forth.

It also features a smaller spotting scope mounted on top and decorated tiles to represent the controls.

As the telescope's range is rather limited, the build also includes a customisable section of "night sky" for you to explore. This includes a number of brick built celestial objects (stars; planets; moons and even a giant space turtle and a lost spaceman looking for his spaceship, spaceship, SPACESHIP!). Each of these objects can be viewed in more detail through the telescope. (I've included a photo showing the nano figure viewed through the 'scope that hopefully gives you some idea of the image produced).

For a more realistic experience, the brick built items can be swapped for decorated tiles featuring actual images of various celestial objects. Using images off the internet, I've made tiles featuring: Mars; Jupiter and the Galilean Moons; Saturn; a comet and Mimas (one of Saturn's moons which looks just like a certain fictional planet destroying space station!). Unfortunately, I don't have the rights to the images I used, but I have added a 2x3 tile with a sticker showing an image of the moon taken from my own telescope to give you the idea.

Finally, you can share your discoveries with the included stargazer minifigure which can be customised to represent a young astronomer of the future.

I decided to build this after recently getting back into stargazing and wanted to see if a functioning model telescope could be built out of just LEGO.

This is my first LEGO Ideas product submission and I think it would make a great set as it would appeal to all ages. It also not only looks good on a shelf (it's hard to walk past without being tempted to look through it every time!) but I hope it will encourage people to learn more about the wonders of the night sky and maybe even inspire them to go out and do some real stargazing of their own.