I’ve emailed them several times, no response. I’ve threatened to start forwarding my email to the magazines they’ve advertised in.

They’re making “humorous” comments on their updates page now about how they are putting up their prices.

I think I’ve been scammed. I don’t care if they aren’t “salesmen” – THEY TOOK THE MONEY FROM MY ACCOUNT QUICKLY AND EASILY ENOUGH!!!!

Very cross about this and I WILL be pursuing them.

It’s going to be a lot of fun.

I finally got a reply from someone apparently using their personal email address. She promised to check with shipping and get back to me. A week later, no news from her so I emailed her and received a reply consisting of the delivery update cut and pasted from the website.

About the only reasons I haven’t cancelled the order is that they would probably take longer to credit my card than deliver the scope and the favorable reviews here.

Edit added 12:35 PM (thanks for that freaure, BA) Here is Irony for you. I hit the submit button and the doorbell rang. It arrived!

Using the 25x eyepiece with a nearly-full Moon I not only got nice views of it and Jupiter with the Galilean moons, but also NGC 457 and M31. I’m thinking they will look pretty darn good under a moonless sky.

I’m suprised to hear people report so much trouble with the “barlow” eyepiece. It seems to work quite well for me and I had no trouble seeing a few cloud bands on Jupiter. Initially, I did have the lens elements backwards in the housing, which I cleared up when I went online and took a look at the “real” instructions. Once that was rectified I thought the scope operated quite well at 50x.

Very nice! However, the tripod I thought I had turned out to be more of a ‘quantum-Schrodinger’ tripod that only exists when nobody needs it (my family seems to collect these kinds of things, we had a camcorder for years that never managed to record anything because it was never findable when there were things to be recorded, and we have several books that we can never find when anyone wants to borrow them, our keys and remotes are also seemingly unconnected with reality, though I understand that is more common)
So I was only able to use it until my arms gave out, during that time though I was able to get a nice, clear view of the moon for about a minute, and several brief glimpses of Jupiter (more by accident than any serious intent) with the 25x eyepiece. I fiddled with the 50x eyepiece briefly and caught a streak of what I believe was Jupiter, but only ever managed to catch an edge of the moon.
with the 25x eyepiece, I was able to get the hang of focusing pretty quickly, though I never had anything in cross-hairs long enough with the 50x.

I’ll get a Newtonian (or at least Einsteinian) tripod this weekend and hopefully get some better views.

I can’t wait to play with it some more when I have a tripod.

I hope everyone who is still waiting get’s theirs shortly.

I can’t believe that you can get this type of quality viewing with a $20 telescope. Three cheers for the Galileoscope team!

Thanks for a most informative post. I’ll check out those references. It’s sort of embarrassing not having a better handle on naval jargon seeing as how my dad retired from the Navy as a full Commander.

It’s actually your longitude that you find using Jupiter’s moons. Before John Harrison invented the chronometer there was no way to determine your longitude (east-west position) while at sea. It works like this: You can determine local noon by “shooting” the sun with a sextant and determining the point of highest elevation. If you also knew the time at your reference (which we still consider the meridian that runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England) you could subtract the two and determine how many hours, minutes and (if you’re lucky) seconds you are away from your reference. Knowing that the Earth rotates 360° in 24 hours, you can then calculate how many degrees, minutes and seconds you were around the globe from Greenwich.

The problem is that, before Harrison, there was no way to keep the time in Greenwich with you on a ship. The only accurate clocks at the time were the pendulum type, and they don’t work on a rolling, pitching ship!

Astronomy to the rescue! By the 17th century the orbits of Jupiter’s moons were known precisely enough to create tables of the eclipses as the moons passed around the planet. The times of the eclipses were stated, of course, in Greenwich time (called UT today). If you had a small telescope with you, then you set your clock to the time of the next eclipse then watched until the eclipse happened and started your clock. This was good to better than one minute in accuracy meaning that you could determine your longitude to better than one degree. This really only worked when you were on land, since the eclipse observations were done at night (and you’d need a really calm sea to be able to see them at all) and your clock probably wouldn’t remain accurate until the next day at noon.

- Jack

After a couple of days, I finally got around to confirming this. At least I don’t have any parts left over now!

I agree that we can’t complain to much. It actually did work when using the wrong rings. I took it out again tonight and looked at the moon, Jupiter and Mizar. Still an amazing value.

- Jack