$20 Telescope Makes Good

Kaoru Ikeya, 19, of Shizuoka Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, was chronically broke. A $28-a-month lathe operator, he gave $25 of each pay check to his widowed mother. But a little thing like lack of money never kept Kaoru from his normally expensive hobby--amateur astronomy. Somehow he accumulated the cash for parts and materials, and all by himself he built an ambitious telescope.

Patiently, Kaoru ground and polished an eight-inch parabolic mirror. He made a tube out of tin plate. The whole instrument cost him only $20. At first it did not work very well, as is usually the case with home-made telescopes. But Kaoru repeatedly took it apart to reduce its faults.

After a year of work, the telescope was good enough to give a clear view of the deep sky. Whenever weather permitted, Kaoru sat up most of the night, getting to know the swarming stars as intimately as he knew the streets of his own town. One recent night, as he scanned the dark sky, he watched the constellations rise with familiar timing above the eastern horizon; then he gradually turned his telescope on the constellation Hydra. There, three degrees southwest of star Pi, he caught a glimpse of a faint misty object. He did not remember seeing it before. He focused his telescope with extra care and looked again. The misty object was still there. With growing excitement he checked his sky maps. They showed nothing at the location of the misty object.

Next night he was back at his telescope, scanning the same area. The misty object was still there. In the morning, he sent an urgent telegram to Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, reporting his find. Next day, the observatory spotted the object, declared it a new comet, named it after its discoverer and informed European astronomical authorities. Word went out to the Harvard College Observatory, Western Hemisphere clearinghouse for astronomical information, which also found the new comet and published its position. Soon telescopes in both hemispheres were combing Hydra for Comet Ikeya.

The brightness of the new comet is 250 times dimmer than the dimmest object visible to the naked human eye. It has no tail, no central nucleus, and it is probably receding from the earth. But in the history of astronomy, it has a singular distinction: it was found by a 19-year-old lathe operator, chief support of a fatherless family, who made his own telescope for $20.

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