Monthly Archives: March 2009

astronomy groups and organizations, galileoscope, international year of astronomy

A Scope in Every Pot

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The Galileoscope Project

One of the most visible parts of the International Year of Astronomy is the Galileoscope. It’s a high-quality telescope that gives a viewer about the same view that astronomer Galileo Galilei had in 1609.  If that sounds a bit “meh” in these times of mega-scopes and super-GOTO mounts and the Web, consider this:  most kids (and adults, really) have never looked through any kind of telescope.  The most contact with the sky a lot of people have is maybe glancing up at the stars as they go outside to the car at night, or they search out something on the Web for the kids’ science fair project.

The Galileoscope.
The Galileoscope.

The Galileoscope gives everybody a chance to have the experience of looking through a telescope and seeing something in the sky that they have never seen before in just that way.  And, there’s a LOT to be said for that experience. It’s like the difference between seeing a picture of an apple and eating one. Or, the difference between reading a play in lit class or actually seeing and hearing it performed live.  Or, the difference between watching someone hug someone else or hugging someone yourself.

The scope (which you can see above) is easy to put together. The best part is, it only costs $15.00.  Now, you’ve probably seen (and heard) me and others with our mantra of “cheap scopes aren’t worth it.”  Well, there’s cheap and then there’s cheap. If you think of department store scopes with wobbly mounts and crappy lenses, then yeah, that’s cheap.  But, while this scope is inexpensive (money-cheap), it has been put together by folks (Rick Fienberg, former editor of Sky & Telescope, Steve Pompea, Hans Hansen and others) who were able to insist on really high-quality work — and it shows. It lets you look at the Moon and Jupiter and a number of other easily found objects. It lets a viewer have that “Galileo moment” that changed everything for astronomy.

There are already a number of educational packets put together to help teachers whose students are putting these together as class optics projects.  And, the best part is, they’re easy to use and they really DO give people a real experience at sky viewing.  And, since astronomy is one of those sciences that really hooks people — it’s a leg up into a real learning experience at any age.

So, check it out. You can buy as many as you want at $15.00 each — at that price you could buy some for yourself and your family and maybe get one or two to donate to local schools or children’s groups.  Give the gift of the sky to yourself and others! Let’s get a scope in every backyard, every schoolyard, and as many street corners as we can!

dyson ring

Earth’s Dyson Ring?

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What’s Orbiting Earth

Trackable objects in orbit around Earth. Courtesy European Space Agency. (Click to embiggen.)
Trackable objects in orbit around Earth. Courtesy European Space Agency. (Click to embiggen.)

I saw this image on CNN earlier today and went searching through the European Space Agency archives for it. It’s a great artist’s conception of the extent of material that humans have lofted into near-Earth space. Ever since we started sending up satellites in 1957, the number of objects — which includes satellites but also cameras and gloves and pieces of collided satellites and other oddments — has increased. Today there are about 12,500 things out there at various altitudes from the surface. This makes calculating safe launch times a complex matter.  The objects in this depiction are not shown to scale — their sizes are exaggerated to make them visible.

Seeing this kind of begs an interesting question. With its ever-increasing supply of “stuff” orbiting around it, does this make Earth a ringed planet?  The classical (canonical) definition of a planetary ring is a ring of cosmic dist and small particles in orbit around a planet in a flat, disc-shaped region. If that’s what we accept, then Earth’s “ring” could be termed an “artificial ring” (sort of the same way that we call Pluto a dwarf planet (it’s a planet, but a special case of a planet)). What do you think?

I’m sort of reminded of the early concepts of a Dyson shell, which was a very thin shell consisting of orbiting power satellites that would capture a star’s energy output and channel it for a civilization’s needs.  Or, more correctly, perhaps this is Earth’s Dyson Shell and its Dyson Ring. Only instead of power, much of the structure is handling our communications needs (among other things).