JERUSALEM: Students and visitors at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem will be able to look at the stars through Albert Einstein’s long lost telescope starting on Thursday, university officials said, after it was retrieved from a storage shed and renovated.

The legendary physicist, who theorised the famous relations among energy, speed and mass, received the telescope in 1954, the year before he died. It was a gift from a friend named Zvi Gizeri, who probably made it himself, university officials said.

It’s not known how much Einstein used it, but a demonstration for media showed it still works well enough to show five moons of Jupiter and the rings on the huge planet.

After three years and about $10,000 in renovations, the telescope is set to be on display for the public on Thursday in conjunction with Researchers Day, when schools across Europe and Israel will open their laboratory doors to the public.

Einstein, who was a co-founder of the Hebrew University, willed his records to the school. There were rumours through the years that he also left a telescope, but it took modern sleuthing and some luck to find it. The old reflecting telescope is cumbersome by modern standards. The long black tube is about 20 centimetres in diameter and two metres long and stands on a base experts said may have been taken from the German army.

It was this unique base, recognisable in a picture of Einstein with the telescope, and a signature from Gizeri on one of its mirrors, that confirmed its authenticity in 2004, when a biologist named Eshel Ophir connected the dots.

The forgotten telescope was first discovered in a storage shed in the late 1990s by a computer specialist at the school. But he did not recognise it as Einstein’s, and it was left in the shed. —AP