Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh assembled his first telescope from spare parts on his family’s Kansas farm — the crankshaft of a 1910 Buick, a cream-separator base, and mechanical components from a straw spreader.

He used this to make sketches of Jupiter and Mars that so impressed the astronomers at Lowell Observatory that they gave him a job there. He discovered Pluto. 

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/09/29/looking-up-7/

https://achievement.org/achiever/clyde-tombaugh/

https://astronomy.com/year-of-pluto/2015/05/young-clyde-how-a-midwestern-farmboy-set-a-course-for-pluto