Slooh brings the heavens to your browser
Slooh is a do-it-yourself stargazing service that puts you behind powerful telescopes in real time. With Slooh's help, you can see a disco-ball-like cluster of stars, a sunflower galaxy, Comet Lovejoy, and other wonders from an observatory atop a Canary Island mountain--all from the comfort of your chair at home.
The Slooh Launch Pad takes you to the moon, and more.
I found the most dazzling views by following Slooh's suggested astronomical points of interest. Guided missions happen at 9:00 p.m. (Universal Time) nightly. The longer you hang out, the riper the images get. Impressed by the blood-red Trifid Nebula, 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation? Slooh lets you snap, save, and show off three pictures at each stop in space.
By contrast, the HubbleSite, which just won a Webby Award, offers images that may be processed a million times to achieve jaw-dropping crispness, but they're not live. Slooh is more beginner-friendly than skywatching sites run by nonprofits and universities. It's also easier to use than a pricey telescope, especially for urbanites who can't see past the smog and city lights. Slooh's views may be 2 million to 3 million times clearer than what you'll see in a city, according to COO Tierney O'Dea.
Slooh can be pretty cool once you get the hang of it, but the Flash-based Mission Interface should be more intuitive. Pop-ups label the various features (unless you turn them off), which is somewhat helpful. But to no avail, I kept clicking arrows around the lens, and I couldn't satisfy the urge to drag around the view.
Nevertheless, Slooh is fun already, and its social networking element can add depth and education to the experience. Slooh's users include newbies and professional astronomers in 70 countries. You can chat, share images, and rate the current sky conditions. One amateur even identified a known asteroid. Slooh also offers podcasts on iTunes, hosted by luminaries, such as comet hunter David Levy and author Phil Harrington. Blogging is coming soon.
Unfortunately, Slooh is free of charge for only a week, and a bit costly at $99 per year thereafter. But a family full of science fans might find it a great value. Because Slooh's founder, Michael Paolucci, wants to make the service more accessible, he's working to give it away to school children in India and Iran.
Slooh is adding telescopes in Chile, with the long-term goal to provide 24-hour coverage of the Earth. Unlike so many dynamic Web services that allow you to network and navel-gaze with a select group of people, Slooh connects you to the vastness beyond our terrestrial, wired world. That's partly why Slooh co-sponsored the surreal Yuri's Night party that kept me up until dawn at the NASA Ames research center last month. That event, like Slooh, was built with the starry-eyed aim of getting more people to celebrate space exploration as an extension of caring for the home planet. I'm excited to see how the Slooh community will evolve around what O'Dea called the "celestial campfire."
Slooh puts you eye-to-eye with the Black-Eye Galaxy, among others.
It is one thing to have your own telescope and watch the stars in real time. But lets face it, watching stars in real time on your computer is not going to be appreciably different than watching a simulation, and probably more boring since there is far less you can customize.
NASA makes so many of their wonderful images available to download for free that I guess I can't see why one would want to subscribe to a service providing "real time" viewing. I guess I don't see the value other than novelty, and I think that would wear off quickly, maybe even before the free week ran out.
I might be tempted to spend $10 a year to try it out, but not 10 times that.
There are many amatuer astronomy groups that let people come and view the real thing through fantastic telescopes on most weekends around the world. My feeling is that nothing is as incredible as an actual photon travelling many millions of light years just to hit my retina perched behind the eyepiece of a telescope.
Get up from your computer and go outside and experience the real deal. Virtual experiences are not always the best bet.
To make the model work, they've basically had to go with an all volunteer staff. They work long hours as volunteers in exchange for a free account. They are the ones labeled "Team SLOOH". There are only like 3 employees and a few officers. One of the predictable outcomes is that you have to basically let the people working for effectively $.02/hour do what they want, make it fun for them. This means that the original group picked like minded people and you pretty much have to think like them to fit into the "community". While they always talk about thousands, there are only a handfull of members- not Team SLOOH- that have been so for at least a year, and posted more than 50 times in the community Forum. So, if the community aspect is what you're after, you will be disappointed if you are not way to the right of center, preferably an Evangelical, and pro-military involvement. Most new members come into chat a few times and then never again. It doesn't help that they solict grant money from all kinds of schools, etc., and are at pains to make it "family friendly" in a total US sense of that term. I actually say a paying member scolded the other night for writing "sh*t", with the asterik, in the presence of only "Team SLOOH" members. Who and what were they protecting? Guess that's what you have to do though. They actually did get a complaint from a member once about someone stating "life probably has to be carbon based, as carbon is so promiscuous". I'm sorry, "Team SLOOH" are "Team SLOOH", not members. It gets really old and very pedantic to have every question raised debated by the "members" actually being the same 15 Team SLOOH saying "I think the way we have it now is fine". The constant back-slapping can be nauseating. If you're new and don't do that, be very careful not to offend. Very, very brittle egos!
The equipment and the connectivity and location of the observatory was the big draw. Many of the images were of very high quality. Unfortunately, the idea of writing software that can remotely control the telescopes, dome, ancillary equipment and distribute it in a Flash application on the web, became the goal itself, not a method of attaining it. The new observatory in Chile is in a very mediocre site near the lights of Santiago and one really has to wonder why you couldn't just stick a telescope in an Aussies back yard, if those are the levels of transparency you will accept. The point would be that it has to be in the middle of nowhere because that's what the software does.
So, around last November, maintenance ceased, except for dire circumstances, because one of the actual employees- a software engineer, surprise, surprise- decided that SLOOH needed a complete software rewrite. To be fair, it does. All the original code has static references to IP addresses and assumes only one telescope, has hard coded params for the obs, etc. The problem is that it's being done without a timetable, no specifications (unless you count, "can run more than one obs." as a specification), and no one is pushing back the "resume padding" being done by the development team. Already you will have to upgrade your memory, processor and by a $500 software program to even use the new version. The Mission Interface Flash widget, the business end of the system, was rewritten in version 8/9, at the time cutting access off to most their Linux users simply because "Flash V6" doesn't loook good on a resume. I have recompiled the current prog under version 6 and it runs just fine.
While this new development is going on, every time people get totally fed up with it, new hardware is announced. Chile was announced a year ago as "coming soon". The hardware was in place in November, then they STARTED the software development SLOOHers are now awaiting. Chile will not be online until it is finished, which i project as August, fully debugged and all by October. That's a complete guess. We have been given not one date. Not even an approximation or benchmark point. So, when comet Boattini went too far south to observe, a year after Chile's announcement, people were a little annoyed. And a new telescope was announced. And a new observatory. And new domes. Of course you don't get any of this until the software is finished.
SLOOH is a really great idea. Was executed well until they were bought by a guy that has stated that he doesn't see what the bad rep. over the .coms was about. Now banal marketing is replacing that good idea. It's time for amateurs to do the same thing with their backyard scopes and create the amatuer, virtual 1/2 mile telescope!
Bottom line, I'm not renewing my membership until I see the hardware is actually online and what they will expect in terms of FITS file processing and how much they will charge for "advanced observing". That's right, talk about a .com model... The new software will offer raw images, where you have to do the work the software now does, you can wait a year for it, and when it's done we're going to charge you more for the privlege!
- by ThreeSlipsAndAGulley September 28, 2009 7:26 PM PDT
- Fall, 2009 update: Chile not online. Oz high mag online on clear nights with no reservations possible. Teide Dome 1 has had a new telescope sitting in a crate for a year. Dome 2 is online, with regular high mag. issues. Unlimited memberships limited to 5 reservations/week on Teide. Team SLOOH is history. (Started astronomy.fm in a pout). Now offering a $5.95/month option. Very cheap...if your time is worth nothing!
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