![]() Paolucci explained that Slooh is targeting both kids and adults with different membership packages. "Slooh" is a play on the phrase to "slew a telescope," meaning to control, or change, its direction, said Patrick Paolucci, Slooh's executive vice president for sales and marketing. In addition, many of the missions are accompanied by audio narration from experts, most prominently Bob Berman of Astronomy magazine. And anyone can participate in missions that are community-directed, all of which are listed on the site's roster of upcoming events. Paying members can also reserve time to direct one of the telescopes to look at a spot in the sky of their choosing-either from a pre-selected list of targets, or by choosing from astronomy catalogs, or by entering coordinates that they wish to focus on. Those using the free version of the service can only access the first four photos they take, while those who pay get unlimited access. The site always has a list of upcoming missions-for example, as of this writing the next few missions will be viewings of Globular Cluster M2, Globular Cluster M15, the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), and the Coccon Nebula (IC 5146).Īnyone can take part in any of those missions, and anyone can use Slooh's interface to take and share photographs based on what the telescopes are showing during the missions. And over that time, those members have used the telescopes in its observatories in Chile, Australia, and the Canary Islands to take more than 1.4 million photographs of the sky.Īt the heart of Slooh's service are so-called "missions," which are essentially pre-determined viewings of specific features of deep space, be they comets, nebulae, galaxies, or the like. Since its founding in 2003, Slooh has built a community of 50,000 members, some who pay for premium access, and some who access its free services. We like people wanting to use the tool to get better access to something they already have." "There's a whole group of enthusiasts on who follow comets a whole group of images, and that's very attractive to us. "What doesn't have is images from people, 'Hey I took this image,' or images taken recently, or images taken right now, or last week, and.Slooh is all of those things," said Noel Gorelick, the technology lead for Sky in Google Earth, the service's official name. Just thought it was cool, and worth sharing.Under the terms of the partnership, Slooh will now provide data that will allow anyone using Google Sky to view a new map layer showing thousands of user-taken photographs of deep space, as well as to access imagery from observatories of eclipses and other significant celestial events. You can create separate folders for your images by type, or date, or however it makes sense to you to organize them, and begin building a catalog of your own images inside a virtual planetarium. Here's NGC 6992 in Google Sky originally: Once you've done the import, YOUR image will be very precisely overlayed in the correct location and orientation in Google Sky. Turns out that if you plate solve your image at, a successful solve will include, among other things, an image.kmz file (On the right, under "Calibration") which you can download and import into Google Sky. KMZ files, which include RA/DEC coordinates, and can include images, and scaling/orientation information. One of those features is the ability to import. ![]() It's navigated like, and shares many common features with, Google Earth. ![]() Google Earth comes with its own version of Google Sky, a "virtual planetarium" if you will. If this is old news to you, please forgive the duplication, and/or offer improvements or tweaks to my idea! Obviously this isn't "new" as in never existed before, but it's new to me, and a quick search here and at a couple of my other forum haunts turned up no threads or discussions about it, so I figured I'd share. So this morning I stumbled across a new way to catalog my astro-images. ![]()
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