Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that we live beneath a shifting canopy of stars. Humanity has woven its dreams and mythologies into the night sky for millennia, yet it can often seem inaccessible or impossibly far away—the realm of space telescopes, celebrity astronauts, and professional astronomers in mountaintop observatories.
For some people, though, there is a way to bring the stars closer and literally take stargazing into their own hands: building telescopes from scratch. These projects take a bit of derring-do, training, tools, and calculations. But in the end, you might craft an instrument capable of seeing hundreds of deep-sky objects, the colorful clouds wrapping themselves around Jupiter, crisp lunar craters, or the dark spots pockmarking the sun. (
