A few months ago I wrote about the Galileoscope, a wonderful inexpensively priced telescope that is being produced as part of the International Year of Astronomy. There were some initial problems with shipping, but I have been told that ’scopes are shipping and will be in the hands of eager folks by early June or July latest! Yay!
Now here’s the thing: production is not so simple for these telescopes, and the folks making them want to continue to do so. But unless they get a bunch of orders right away production will stop. They need orders by the end of May, which means that if you’re thinking of getting one or more — and at $15 each (plus shipping) it’s cheap to do so — then please send in your order now! Don’t wait; if you do it may be too late. At the very least the price will go up, and at worst they won’t be able to make any more.
I bought three: one for my daughter (and, to be honest, me), one for her school, and one to give away on the blog. I’ll do that last bit once they get here — but don’t rely on winning it; I expect to get about 1000 entries for it.
So stop reading this blog and go buy a ’scope or three. Give ‘em to folks who can’t afford ‘em, donate one to a school, or simply designate your order to go to a faraway land where the kids need the inspiration and awe of seeing Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus, the mountains of our own Moon, or Saturn’s rings.
I became interested in astronomy at the age of five because I saw Saturn through a small telescope. Will you please help another child appreciate the wonder of astronomy? You never know where it will take them.
For those few of you left who aren’t sick of hearing my voice, I did an interview with the podcast EUSci that’s now online (here’s the direct link to the mp3). We talked about IYA, JREF, my book, astronomy… you know, all the ho-hum usual stuff!
Cripes, I’m getting behinderer every day, so I missed posting about this: The 100 Hours of Astronomy effort began yesterday! It’s a cornerstone project of IYA, to do 100 continuous hours of astronomy-related observations or activities.
For example, telescopes all over the planet are observing the skies and webcasting it all live.
There are star parties all around the world; Popular Mechanics has an alphabetical list of the ones in the US.
Even space probes are in on it; the Cassini Saturn probe team posted their favorite Saturn images on their site in honor of Galileo.
100 Hours was honored in an APOD image, too.
You can follow all this by going to the 100 Hours site, and get info as it happens on their Twitter feed, too. And don’t forget to classify those galaxies!
Remember Galaxy Zoo? It’s a project using professional images of galaxies, but has citizens — that means you! — classifying them. It’s the crack cocaine of the internet; once you start it’s hard to stop.
Well, the folks in charge of it have decided to use that addictive quality to their advantage. This week is the IYA’s 100 Hours of Astronomy effort, where observatories and other ventures are doing all sorts of outreach including live observations, all spanning the 100 hours of time from April 2 - 5. And Galaxy Zoo wants to classify 1,000,000 galaxies in those 100 hours!
Sound crazy? They’re already halfway there! [Incidentally, in the time it took me to write this blog entry 9000 more have been classified.] If you’ve fiddled with Galaxy Zoo before, you know how much fun it is: all you have to do is take a simple test so that they know you can classify galaxies (into elliptical, irregular, and spiral (both clockwise and anticlockwise)) and once you do, off you go. They’ve made some improvements to the process since I last wrote about it, so even if you’ve been there before, it’s time to revisit. It’s fascinating, it’s fun, and you’re using real data and doing a real contribution to science.
So get in there and start classifying!
Oh, when will this tyranny of astronomy-related censorship ever end?
I am referring, of course, to The Colbert Report, which has on every astronomer in the world but me. Stephen, what must I do? I wrote a book about the end of the world, and I even threatened to have Buzz Aldrin punch you. And yet you still invite Derrick Pitts on your show, and not me?
Sure, Derrick did a really good job, being funny, talking about what Galileo did, and why it was important. But where was the talk of giant asteroid impacts, the vaporizing of our planet by a gamma-ray burst, or the danger of a gigantic solar flare wiping out our electric grid?
Oh, Stephen, when you go for the real information and not the scare factor, what’s next? Unicorns? Rainbows? Politics?
Sigh, maybe when I’m in NYC in a couple of weeks, I’ll see if Neil Tyson can hook me up. I hear he’s had some sort of tangential relationship with The Colbert Report in the past.
I’ve been getting some mail from folks who are a little unhappy with the customer service when they’ve ordered Galileoscopes — a big effort by IYA to get good but inexpensive telescopes into the hands of people across the globe. The IYA just posted about this: basically, it’s being run by a very small group of volunteers who have been a bit (well, a lot) overwhelmed with the response. They assure us the ’scopes will be shipped in late April.
That’s good news! I’m very excited to get mine — as I wrote earlier, I think it might be able to show the ISS as an extended body, and not just a point of light. How cool would that be?
A few things:
1) I have been informed by my blogdaughter (I showed her how to get socially networked at an American Astronomical Society meeting last year!) Alice that her blog Alice’s AstroInfo has moved to a new URL (that link goes to the current address). So update your links if you haven’t yet, and/or drop her in your feed reader if you haven’t been reading her stuff.
2) Skepticamp guy Reed Esau tells me that there are two Camps this weekend: one in Phoenix (with the truly awesome Michael Stackpole), and one in Vancouver Canadia.
3) I’ve mentioned this before, but just a reminder that 100 Hours of Astronomy is coming up in early April. Get ready.
4) Also, as many people have noted, I wonder if amateur exorcist and Louisiana doomer Bobby Jindal is scratching his head over volcano monitoring now?
