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How I miss the good ol' days when most products were from Amazon so reviews were genuine and you could just trust them...
Anyway, I was a top-500 reviewer on the UK site, mainly focusing on products I know a lot about, e.g. telescopes, as reviews on technical items by people who are clueless are dangerous (the worse telescope can get a 5* review if the user manages to sort of get a glimpse of the moon with it). At some point (a couple of years ago) I noticed there were some really suspicious looking binoculars as top sellers, including multiple listings of the same tiny "30x60 night vision" binoculars that were obviously neither 30x60 nor night vision, so I took it upon myself to get and review the 3 top ones - for one of them I even signed up to a "review club" that gave them to you for free in exchange of a review. They were actually worse than I expected (e.g. one 10x50 had the body of a 50mm binocular, but just 19mm effective aperture prisms!) - you can see a blog writeup here if you are curious - so I had to leave very detailed, technical, with picture proof, but scathing reviews. Since I was a top-500 user the reviews started from the first page, but then the disappeared. I was getting mass downvoted, so I dropped in reviewer rank and the reviews themselves were not visible in the first pages. A person contacted me through my blog and send me screenshots of facebook discussions with a seller who had a big FB group with people getting stuff for reviews, who was asking for all their groupies to downvote my reviews, calling me various names. A seller (the same or not, I don't remember) also wrote me and told me I was reported to Amazon for malicious slander and they wrote comments under my reviews that I was an unscrupulous competitor, owner of "Agena Astro". That last one is sort of funny, as Agena Astro is a huge and very respected US astronomical retailer which I, sadly, do not own :) (or have any relation to).
Anyway, I contacted Amazon, sent them all that stuff including images of the whistleblower, they did jack. Not even restore my reviews or reviewer ranking, never mind punishing those organized sellers & reviewers. I mean Amazon has GREAT support if you are a customer in general (they have helped me even with badly behaving manufacturers - call me Samsung), but I was kind of appalled at how they did not care about this thing going on.

Fifth, they provide a cloud forecast, which is useful for astronomy.

Interesting, I didn't know this service. For astronomy forecasts I cross-check a couple of services, but my favourite is 7timer.info, which, apart from cloud cover, gives you transparency and does an astro-seeing (atmospheric turbulence) forecast. In fact, its only issue was its unreliable server, which is why I donated a reliable server to the project, and made a free iOS client (Xasteria).

Solar is ideal for the Greek islands. They have been building wind-power generators on some (e.g. the Cyclades), however the peak energy usage on islands is exactly when the sun is shining hot. The battery requirements should not be that great, especially compared to other scenarios.
I've had a solar roof on mainland Greece for several years now, which, at 10kW nominal (Renesola Virtus II hybrid) was predicted to produce 12-13 MWh/year due to its suboptimal E/W orientation, but it is generating over 14 MWh every year, and some islands are even more sunny from that mountainous area. For something geek-cool check out the bottom of this page to see how my solar roof "perceived" a partial solar eclipse ;)

Shameless plug here, but if you have an iOS device (sorry, I've never tried android development) you might enjoy Xasteria's weather report for astronomers/astrophotographers, which has no registration, no tracking, no ads. I don't usually promote the service since it is kind of "niche", but maybe there are /. ers into that stuff. Otherwise, the web service 7Timer that it is based on, has non-astronomical predictions as well (based on NOAA data). I am donating the main server for that free service, so it also has no ads or tracking (well it uses a google Map API if you allow your browser to share your location, so Google knows where you are as usual).

They are kind of niche apps. Xasteria is a weather app with features for amateur astronomers and Polar Scope Align is mainly for polar aligning equatorial telescopes, along with some tools for observers and astrophotographers.

They are kind of niche apps. Xasteria is a weather app with features for amateur astronomers and Polar Scope Align is mainly for polar aligning equatorial telescopes, along with some tools for observers and astrophotographers.

I know what you mean, I also made it to the last total eclipse and all kangaroos must have been huddled together somewhere, cause we couldn't see any of them!

I am a top-500 reviewer on Amazon.co.uk, so my reviews generally show up high quickly (ok, maybe not because of ranking just by upvotes - haven't looked into how it works). I try to review things I know a lot about, so I wrote some (very accurate, technical and detailed, but bad) reviews on some binoculars (also put them in a blog post here, helpful for people buying binoculars on Amazon) that were highly rated and/or top sellers, but were of unknown branding or had ridiculous specs (30x60 pocket binoculars).
So, on some listings my bad reviews which came on top, started getting bursts of downvotes. Like 10 a day. A person actually contacted me to tell me he belonged to a FB group of the seller where they would get free stuff to review. The seller told the group I am a lying competitor and gave them links to my reviews for downvoting (hence the bursts). The person who contacted me looked into my reviews instead and figured out I was just a knowledgeable reviewer and even sent me screenshots of the FB threads. I forwarded the info to Amazon and they didn't do anything. Well, in fact, I can no longer find the review that had offended that seller the most, so maybe they did something in the end :)
Additionally, a seller (the same if I remember correctly) wrote me and told me they had reported me to Amazon for malicious reviews. They left comments under my reviews saying that I am a competitor who owns Agena Astro (hilarious, that's a huge US astro retailer!). I also brought that crap to Amazon's attention, they didn't seem to mind.
In all, I love Amazon, I've been a Prime subscriber for over a decade mainly because their customer service is second to none...
But that customer service is only stellar when it comes to you buying/returning etc stuff, they don't really seem to care about marketplace sellers going rogue. Which is a shame, back a decade ago most of the stuff was sold by Amazon and the reviews were a surefire way to find what is good and what is not. Nowadays, you can't trust them. And it's not just the shady reviewers, even some that Amazon itself picks (Vine) are obviously clueless about most of the stuff they review and how legit are your reviews anyway when you do several per day?
So, you still get easy returns/refunds etc, but you can no longer rely on the reviews - probably with the exception of something sold only by Amazon.

Hehe, good point. Although what would then be a solar eclipse from the moon is still not as spectacular as a solar eclipse from earth where the similar angular size of the moon and sun enable us to see the sun's magnificent corona. You would get to see though, the atmosphere of the earth light up like a thin ring, which while less spectacular than the corona (at least for repeated viewings) would certainly give you more food for thought.
To get back to the original topic, a lunar eclipse can be beautiful in itself, especially if the atmospheric conditions give you that nice deep red color. For example here is a timelapse video and photos I took from the 9/2015 lunar eclipse with an 80mm apochromatic telescope. Quite nice if I may say so.

Two types of solar film (non-glass) dominate the market for solar filters in amateur astronomy circles. Black polymer by Thousand Oaks, and Baader astrosolar safety film. The black polymer is black (duh) and produces an aesthetically pleasing orange image of the sun. The Baader film is metallic and photographically superior to black polymer, but makes the sun appear a pale white-pink or white-blue.

Both types are used to produce legit eclipse glasses. Companies buy big sheets of them and cut them to fit in between paper glasses frames. Unfortunately there are dangerous knockoffs of both types (black and metallic).

No, I don't actually use it. It is in my summer house in Greece and produces about 14MWh per year, which is sold to the electric company.
It is not optimally oriented, since it lies flat on a dual-pitched roof, with half the panels facing east and half facing west, but on some summer days I peak at 8.4kWh hourly, which is not bad at all.
And I'll throw in a graph I like, a partial (30%) solar eclipse as "seen" by my panels ;) (from my eclipse report)

No, I don't actually use it. It is in my summer house in Greece and produces about 14MWh per year, which is sold to the electric company.
It is not optimally oriented, since it lies flat on a dual-pitched roof, with half the panels facing east and half facing west, but on some summer days I peak at 8.4kWh hourly, which is not bad at all.
And I'll throw in a graph I like, a partial (30%) solar eclipse as "seen" by my panels ;) (from my eclipse report)

Average power doesn't make much sense for a solar system - they work during the day in a sort of parabolic curve (for a cool graph see the last image here where a partial solar eclipse "eats away" part of that curve). The PV system that produced the graph in that image I linked to, is at my vacation home in Greece and at 10kW nominal power it produces about 15MWh per year, or half the amount of this Porche pylon (which does not look like the Monolith to me). Given that Berlin is not as sunny as Greece, it would mean this pylon is more than twice my 10kW installation, I guess at least 25-30kW nominal would be needed to generate 30MWh per year.

I've got one of those Zenit's with the 300mm Helios lens and sniper mount. Here is an example shot of the Orion Nebula and here is comet Hale-Bopp. Both were made in a light-polluted city (Athens), shot through a cheap lens and scanned with a crappy scanner, so don't expect quality.

I've got one of those Zenit's with the 300mm Helios lens and sniper mount. Here is an example shot of the Orion Nebula and here is comet Hale-Bopp. Both were made in a light-polluted city (Athens), shot through a cheap lens and scanned with a crappy scanner, so don't expect quality.