Category Archives: telescopes

galileoscope, telescopes

A Low-cost Telescope For Astronomy Education

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The Galileoscope

My friend and colleague Rick Fienberg, who is vice president of Galileoscope, LLC , has a cool project he and colleague Doug Arion of Carthage College started for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. It’s called the Galileoscope, and they have sold many, many of these easy-to-assemble telescopes at cost.

The Galileoscope Telescope kit. Courtesy Galilescope, LLC.
The Galileoscope Telescope kit. Courtesy Galilescope, LLC.

If you run a gift shop in a museum, planetarium, or other institution, you might want to think about stocking these useful and popular telescopes. When I first saw one of these scopes I was really impressed at how easy they were to put together and how well they allowed people to see things like lunar craters, the Jovian moons, the phases of Venus, and the Pleiades.  These guys are donating all their labor and are only charging to cover the costs of the project.

The Galileoscope comes as a kit that takes only a few minutes and no tools to assemble. It’s perfect for classroom activities, group projects, etc.

Interested? Read what Rick has to say about terms and prices.

“We sell the Galileoscope wholesale in cases of six at $25 per kit ($150 per case) plus shipping. Our dealers are selling Galileoscopes at retail prices between $49.95 and $59.95. Most are also leveraging the kit to sell other products, for example by bundling it with accessories such as tripods and star maps.
 
Galileoscopes are also useful in your education and outreach programs; we even provide economical and convenient training via our Galileoscope Workshops. Further support for the Galileoscope is provided through TeachingWithTelescopes.org, a website from the science educators at the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
 
You can learn more about the Galileoscope at http://galileoscope.org and by looking over the attached flyer. If you can pay by credit card or PayPal, you can order from 1 to 11 cases online (http://galileoscope.org/shop/galileoscope-case-of-6/); to use another payment method, or to place a larger order, you can fill out our bulk-orders form (http://galileoscope.org/bulk-orders/), and we’ll send you a quote and invoice.
 
If you carry the Galileoscope in your shop, we will link to your website from our home page to refer customers your way. Please let me know if you have any questions, need more information, or want me to send you a sample Galileoscope kit. Thanks for your consideration.”
stargazing, telescopes

Telescope Jonesing

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To GOTO or not to GOTO?

I was browsing around the other day on the Web, looking at reviews of automated telescopes. Now, mind you, I already have a telescope — a very nice 6″ Sovietski that came with a pier mount you could dock boats to.  It’s a great scope, but it’s not set up in my yard, and so I have to drag it out whenever I want to do any viewing.  Which means, between bad weather at night, clouds of mosquitos, and the weight of the pier mount, it doesn’ get out as often as I’d like it to. Yet, I like to look through scopes at the sky.  I have a smaller AstroScan, which is more portable, but has its limitations.

So, I’ve been considering two options:  1) selling the Sovietski to someone who might use it more than I do and then buying an easier-to-transport automated scope, or b) keeping the Sovietski and buying the automated ‘scope anyway.

The cost of the new automated scopes is more than I expected, at least in the 6-inch and higher range.  But they are sweet-looking, and it would be nice to slew from object to object on the few occasions when I have sky, time, and good weather here.  Now, I know there are these debates that still rage in the amateur community about whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous polar alignment issues that are inherent in both types of scopes.

And, there are those who say you’re not truly doing astronomy if all you do is “point and shoot.” They wax lyrical about the “fun of the chase” in searching out dim, distant fuzzies in the sky. Having done it, I can see their point, somewhat. I don’t subscribe to any such stringent “one-true-way” outlooks; I just wanna get out there and do some guerilla viewing when I can.  There’s no deadline on this; I just have to save the money up to do it, if I decide to get one of these scopes.  But, as for the to GOTO or not to GOTO?  No problems there.