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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."
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.
Even with only your eyes and the night sky, astronomy isn't boring. It requires effort, however. Sure, most kids may not care about the sky. But like most interests, it becomes more engrossing as more effort is put into it. Go outside at midnight every night, sit on a roof, and sketch the sky. Learn the names of the things you can see, figure out when they'll be where, watch the planets move, look up notable events like meteor showers.
Now go buy a good pair of 10x50 binoculars. Look at the Orion Nebula. It's easy to find and it's cool. Now go looking for Messier objects. Andromeda's a good choice - it's quite visible in binos even in a city like San Jose on the right night, but it takes a little effort to find at first. Work your way to more difficult objects. Learn what they are. Learn what they do.
There's as much to keep you, or a kid, entertained in astronomy as there is in anything else. It just takes some effort, and after the night sky sketching it will likely be fun all the way. Or it may not be for you, but it doesn't hurt to try.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
1girl1telescope
I'm so sorry I said that.
Don't forget the impending moon impact in a couple weeks, lunar eclipses, passes of the space station. How many stars can be seen in the Pleiades Constellation? (there's more than 7 sisters)
What really changed my attitude when I was younger was to visualize the sky not as a 2 dimensional canvas with bears and dippers, but in the third dimension by imagining the distance variations between the brighter and smaller stars. Judging distance by size/luminosity proved to be inaccurate, but it was good for a start. The planets/stars size comparison videos really drive that lesson home.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
True. I would probably say though that Astronomy without a telescope is more interesting than with one. You can learn the constellations and see how the planets move across them. Or how meteor showers originate from the same patch of sky. Or viewing predicted transits or man-made satellites. With a telescope you try to concentrate too much on how good you see something rather than what you're seeing.
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
While I disagree with your aggressively hostile attitude towards the Galileoscope project, an Internet-connected scope sounds like a really good idea. I took a quick Google & found a couple already, such as The Internet Telescope but what they seem to lack is real-time control. Sending off an email to request an image of something that a backyard astronomer cannot see is cool, but lacks the visceral thrill of twiddling the knobs.
I remember seeing a robot arm on the Internet in the early days - you could move it, stack blocks, etc. Maybe something like that would be interesting - mount a scope on a tripod with servos (a ham radio satellite tracking mount, maybe?) with a camera (what type?) mounted to the end.
I'm going to need a good think about this, and I sadly lack a place to *put* it. Thanks for the idea, though. I wish you'd signed a name to your post so I could credit you if I manage to go somewhere with this.