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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."
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.
Here in rural Nepal, we would use the telescope to see when ama was going to get up the hill with fresh water, or dada was returning from the hilltop with a bit of fresh meat. A similar thing is happening with the $200 netbook project, they are becoming the village telephone and whatnot when the power goes out for the mandatory 6 hours or so. But this is not to say that new low-cost educational tech is not useful or not needed more then fresh water, sanitation, shelter, and food. The low cost cell phone microscope is saving lives, and laptops are powering entire comm links for villages without power most of the time. Keep it all coming!
Jigs in Nepal
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH