My wife just bought me a years subscription to SLOOH.com for xmas and was wondering if anyone here has joined or had other knowledge about it. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to check out any of the missions, and am curious about the quality and/or entertainment value of the site.
Holy Jebus, that website looks cool! I’m going to have to look into this some more.
As an undergrad in the early nineties, I worked at a robotic telescope. One of my jobs was to schedule observations for internet observers. Anybody could sign up on our website, and we’d do a few each night, as we had time. They’d e-mail us the object, exposure time, filters, etc. and we’d e-mail them images in FITS & GIF format. Eventually, everything got automated on the website and I was out of a job. (Or, rather, I moved on to more scientifically interesting things.)
We kept a big map of the world with pushpins showing where our internet observers were. Some were amateur astronomers tracking asteroids and stuff, and some where just people who wanted to have their very own picture of the Moon or Polaris or whatever.
We just had an 8-inch telescope on a rooftop in a city, but we could do some nice stuff.
Lord Ashtar, that was my initial reaction as well. Perfect for a guy like me with a great interest in astronomy, yet no time to join a local astronomy club. Plus the added convenience of the telescopes (15" I believe) being in the Canary Islands, they are 5 hrs. ahead of me, and higher in altitude than I could ever hope to find locally (of course nothing really beats looking through an actual telescope in person, but I’ll take what I can get). The professional commentary along with the live viewings doesn’t hurt either. I’m totally jazzed… can’t wait 'till tonight!
Podkayne, that sounded like it would have been fun. How big did your virtual audience get?
A couple hundred, over the years, with about a dozen “regulars.”