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One Telescope Per Child
An anonymous reader writes "It seems one-<object>-per-child goes beyond laptops. A project from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has designed a high-quality, $20 telescope they're calling the Galileoscope, hoping to spark interest in astronomy among kids and make good scopes available to many who otherwise could not afford one. But as OLPC learned, it's not that easy; they are struggling to get enough volume to get production ramped up and costs down, resorting to tricks like auctioning off a few autographed ones, and trying Give-One-Get-One."
I'll take two, and give one to my daughter.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
An interesting benefit in living in poorer countries is that there is far less light pollution.
Maybe they could make these even cheaper by making some of the optics smaller (reducing the aperture), since something good enough to see Saturn's rings in rural America should be far more capable in an area with almost zero light pollution, like rural Africa.
Given that most of us watch real life only through keyholes and telescopes... :o)
*ducksandrunsforcover*
A direct link to the Galileoscope project site would be great, wouldn't you think?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Noble intentions indeed.
Call me a skeptic, but when you can get a basic refractive telescope plus tripod (which will easily cost more than the scope itself) for under $40 I'm not exactly enthusiastic about this. And when kids find out that all they can do is look at the moon and get headaches, they'll learn one thing: Astronomy without super-expensive equipment is boring.
"Now go looking for Messier objects"
That's exactly what I did, and that's how I got into your girlfriend's room. She's tired of you sitting on the goddamned roof, staring at the stars. Now, get your ass down from there, will you? I can't service ALL the women around here by myself! And, just LOOK at her ROOM!!! It's a MESS, just like you said. Satisfied women don't live like this!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I hope they get the support that they need, this is a great idea for promoting Science. It's cheap enough that even town and city councils could provide them to the community at an even further discounted rate. I really hope it catches on.
Most kids live in urban areas. They can't see the stars due to light pollution. Stupid idea.
Why not internet controlled telescopes so that they can explore with the OLPC laptops?
I just got mine last weekend and they are very cool little telescopes. Although the day after I got it we have had clouds almost all night every night, so no star gazing for me...
hello
free telescopes... creating a whole generation of peeping toms...
Sorry Negroponte, you aren't gonna get your ass out of the mess you created by sending telescopes to African countries. Erm. Maybe I should RTFA.
A buddy brought one of these on our last backpacking trip. Nice an light, and surprisingly good for something with plastic optics. A couple of words of warning: the images are inverted, so they are great for looking at the sky but not as good for spying on your fellow backpackers. Also, the focus is a simple slide, so it's tough to get a good focus without moving the scope around. I can see how a kid might grow impatient with those faults. You are going to want to put this on a secure tripod - they aren't so good holding in your hands.
Aside from that, I agree that this is something that every kid should have. Perhaps it will get them outside looking at the sky instead of inside immersed in some FPS game.
Im curios how it would compare to something like this that is the same price range more or less
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7999783#ProductDetail
The abstract misses the fact that the Galileoscope is a reproduction similar in image quality to the one Galileo himself used.
or else!
One Voyeur Victim Per Neighbour
http://velociraptorz.org/
http://blog.mithis.net/archives/gaming-miniconf/97-programmer-art-its-deadly
I'm amazed by the fact that people seem reluctant to buy this. It is an awesome telescope and the perfect christmas gift, even for whole families. Don't be scared by the 20$ price tag -- they also accept donations if you think it is too low.
My younger siblings will have a whole lot of universe to learn the upcoming year.
http://xkcd.com/292/
One for me, one for each of my nieces. Hopefully they'll arrive by christmas.
At this price, you can afford to buy them even if they might end up going unused. Why not test it out? You might like it.
"Every child should have health insurance..." Okay, we all need to be healthy to live and children should not be penalized for their parent's ineptitude. Well, in fact if the parents are inept, the children are penalized in many ways already but let's try to make it easier.
"One laptop per child...." Computer literacy is an essential part of modern life. Rare is the job in which someone does not have to use a computer at one point or another. Computers are versatile so the child can use it to write stories, write software, explore mathematical concepts, search about history, learn Sanskrit, etc. etc. etc.
"One telescope per child." Say what? I think we are veering into "pet project" territory here. How about these?
"one terrarium per child"
"one guitar per child"
"one bicycle per child"
"one cadaver per child" (promote medicine)
"one mentally ill person per child" (promote psychiatry)
"one [intentionally left blank] per child" (promote imagination)
Hmm... but maybe I should seize the opportunity and start my own pet project: "One Sanskrit grammar per child."
I kid, I kid... But these things are useless if you live within 10 miles of a large metropolitan area. I live outside of a large city and im lucky I can see the moon at night with all the light generated by the city.
Have you priced decent telescopes? I am sure these probably are not too much better than the $50 ones at Wal-Mart, but shoot, I would be willing to plop down $100 to get me one and buy 4 kids one. That is something cheap and practical, and as other people mentioned, in poorer countries with less light polution, this is like the perfect gift. Well, that and food, but I already sponser hungry children and bag food.
I am an amateur astronomer and bought one of these for my 12-year-old daughter's birthday. I thought it would be a fun daddy-daughter project putting it together and that it would be a good first telescope for her. I got it before they raised the price recently, so mine was around $23 shipped.
Here is my honest review of the scope and my buying experience. It took about two months longer than they said for it to arrive and their communication was non-existent. I was billed but never got a shipping notification. The invoice said it would take 4-6 weeks for delivery. After 6 weeks had passed, I tried to contact them to find out what the status was.
They have a phone number and email address listed on the site you can use to contact them, but the phone is never answered and just goes to voicemail, which was full the two times I called it. My emails were never answered. They eventually put up some vague delay information on their website, and I did finally get the telescope 11 weeks after I ordered it.
It was a fun project putting the scope together. The instructions were not very good, but we printed off some more detailed instructions from their website and everything went smoothly. The optics are good quality. Much, much better than your standard cheap department store telescope. We took it out on the first night and got a pretty good view of Jupiter. Note that the scope does not come with a tripod. I knew that (it is clear on their website) and had a couple photo tripods ready to use it on.
There are two main downsides to the scope. The first is the focuser. If you have used a regular telescope, you know that they all come with rack-and-pinion focusers. With this scope, you slide the eyepiece tube in and out (like an old pirate-y telescope) to focus. It is very difficult to keep an object in view (like Jupiter) when you have to slide the tube in and out. There is a lot of friction, but there has to be or it will just slide out of focus. So focusing is an exercise in frustration. My daughter was unable to do it and I had a pretty hard time myself.
The second is that it cannot use a diagonal. There is not enough travel in the focuser to allow a diagonal. That means that you strain your neck trying to see objects higher in the sky.
Having laid that information out for you, I still think it is a good scope. I hope my daughter gets some use out of it. I think that with practice the focusing will get easier.
If I may say so, life is a game, and there's so much to do and so few turns.
-Reiner Knizia
... after Bad Astronomer pimped them a bit. Good cause, all that.
They're decent enough scopes, and VERY good for the price.
The delivery time is atrocious, however. I think mine took around 3-4 months to arrive. As cheap as they were, I'd about written them off as a scam.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.