Dayananda Sirigere, a hobbyist inventor who fashions camera lenses and telescopes made from PVC pipes and discarded electronic equipment, has been getting inquiries from unlikely corners. “In September, a businessman called from California,” says the 53-year-old. “He said he will be coming to Bengaluru to meet me as he was fascinated by what I do.”

While most of his equipment costs Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 to make, his talents have remained largely undiscovered by shutterbugs. “Until a neighbour came and admired his work, I kept telling him to throw all this rubbish out,” says his wife Ratna Rao.

The “rubbish” is about 35 cartons of telescope lenses stacked up in their house in Bengaluru’s Chandra Layout. Sirigere seems completely uninterested in the possibilities of using his skills to pursue a commercial end. He is fired by passion for the “practical” aspect of science.

“In school, I used to wonder what the planets we drew looked like,” he says. “Much later, when I was going through some bad times in the 90s, people attributed it to an unfavourable influence of Saturn.”

This rekindled his curiosity in astral bodies, and he got to work on trying to make a telescope. Years of trial and error followed till 2003 when his efforts came to fruition and his first telescope was ready. “I assembled an optical lens, a mirror lens and a PVC pipe using calculations based on the focal length of the lenses,” Sirigere explains.

When he looked through it, he was overjoyed. He then began working on how to attach a powerful lens to a camera to photograph planets. For this, he used a teleconvertor to enlarge the image.

He finished his first telephoto lens in 2005. “I made a wide-angle lens that covers 180 degrees and another that covers 230 degrees,” he says. The macro lens in his collection has enabled him to photograph the pores in the eye of an ant and air bubbles and droplets of water in a leaf against light. “If you attach it to a video camera, you can see the water movement in leaves,” he says.

His lenses and telescopes have kept him up nights in the open, gazing at the galaxy. “Some parts of the moon reflect more light due to its undulated surface,” he says. “The craters are best visible on the fourth day after the new moon because that side is facing Earth.”

As novel as his hobby is, he is also aware of its amateur nature. “The lenses are too bulky for some people, unlike the professional ones. There’s no way I can build in auto-focus,” he says. Procuring a camera and xerox lenses collecting dust in homes or shops takes time. “Whenever I’m visiting someone or passing by someplace and I notice parts I could use, I ask the owners if I could buy them,” he says.

Once when Sirigere wanted to photograph cricketers in Chinnaswamy Stadium, the security stopped him and asked what he was carrying in his bag. They refused to believe they were lenses. They said, “These look more like AK-47s,” he says with a hearty laugh.

Before he moved to Bengaluru eight years ago, he often let children look at the stars through his telescopes in his native Sirigere, a village in Chitradurga district. “In rural areas, children don’t have any exposure to the practical aspect of science,” he says. With them, he has observed eclipses, the rings of Saturn and four of Jupiter’s moons.

The people and the clear skies of the pastoral countryside beckon, but it might take him a couple of years to shift base. “Ideally, I would like a village not yet penetrated by electricity,” he says.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Magazine / by Chetana Divya Vasudev / October 31st, 2015