We've seen some creative DIY projects over time, but this one could be moving to the top of the MacGyver leaderboard. Discovered by a Reddit exchange over some amazing space photos, it turns out the photos weren't taken by some mountaintop observatory, but rather by a regular guy, with a not-so-regular telescope worth $20,000 he built in his back yard.

Not content to sit back and wait for an asteroid to obliterate all life on Earth, a group of scientists and space vets are launching their own telescope. Sentinel will be the world's first privately funded space telescope, and it will orbit the sun and map out the asteroids lurking around the interior of our solar system.

We all know about the FBI and the CIA, but you might not be as familiar with the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for our spy satellites. The NRO apparently has more of these things than it knows what to do with, and it's decided to donate two Hubble-sized spy sats to NASA to play with.

As part of its plan to harvest asteroids, Plantary Resources is going to be launching a [insert collective noun for telescopes here] of space telescopes. Whenever they're not busy finding asteroids made of solid gold, we might be able to use them to snap actual pictures of exoplanets around other stars.