SLOOH: Online Remote Telescopes

Has anyone ever heard or actually used this? A telescope that you can control from your computer, for a charge of course.
I wish it had a demo, just to see if its even worth it.

Homepage

Slooh is the only LIVE online observatory. It's for everyone and easy to use – even for complete beginners. All you need to use Slooh is a computer, an internet connection, and the curiosity to see what's happening up in space. As a Slooh Member, you receive immediate access to robotic telescopes around the world.

Two observatory domes, located on Mount Teide in the Canary Islands, have already delivered over a quarter million images to our members since 2003. Each observatory contains two telescopes, one wide field and one high magnification, so you have options when viewing every beautiful celestial object. Slooh is also your own personal space camera, with the ability to snap photos with point & click ease. Chile and Australia will be online in 2008, giving you access to the wonders of the Southern Hemisphere and more hours to enjoy the night sky - even during the day, no matter where you live.

Choose from two types of Slooh memberships: Commander or Explorer. The Commander Membership is all-inclusive, giving you unlimited viewing time for a full year and includes your own web page to share your cosmic journey. The Explorer Membership gives you a block of telescope time to take a whirl around the Universe and create personal sky p

I'm a member. The site is pretty cool. There is also a 7-night free trial, you enter in your CC info (verisign) to get it (so they don't have spammers in chat and stuff) but they don't charge it until the trial is over. I also had a day of bad weather during my trial and they extended my trial a whole extra week.

Anyway - you get your own webpage too. The member gallery is here - www.myslooh.com... .

Slooh is in a couple other threads on this site too - Here's one:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Slooh is an excellent site. I have been a member for almost two years. I don't use it as much as I used to, but on a cloudy night it is the next best thing to looking through a telescope.

What is nice is the observatory in the Canary Islands is five hours ahead of us so you can start viewing in the afternoon. They also have a nightly radio program at 9:00 PM EST and you can log into chat and ask questions. The people running the site are professional astronomers and very helpful.

They have got their second site in Chile up and running and will soon have one in Australia. I think their goal is to locate observatories so you can observe at any time throughout a 24 hour day.

I highly recommend it.

I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in astronomy. Even if only to look at the celestial beauty and wonder for it's own sake.

This is one of the "good things" on the Net. Telescopes are great but clouds happen. Clouds here now... One day this sort of technology may be used to look for other things lets's say in orbit.

Cheers,

Vic



[edit on 3-2-2008 by V Kaminski]

I was just thinking the other day that this would be a great idea... As with all great ideas I always seem to be one step behind in the execution of such.

A side note: Another great idea would be active webcams throughout the Shuttle and Space Station to give us an unbiased look at the life and times...

Indeed, Online Observatories are a cool and great idea! I wouldn't spend any money at SLOOH just yet though...

reply to post by damajikninja


Why not? They've been online since 2003 and done as advertised for over 250,000 objects. I just did some research around the web and it looks like I'm not the only happy customer.

Doesn't it get over subscribed though? surely there is not enough telescopes to cater for everyone? i would be very very interested in this but i still can't see how they get enough time for everyone, also would be a bad thing if you just discover something that nobody else has and boom time is up then its lost,

Maybe they would check it for you if that happened? and record it if it was important? pretty cool thank you for posting this.

reply to post by theinterwebs

Not that SLOOH is a bad place - certainly not. They are a fine group of people, I'm sure. But you never know what might become available elsewhere...