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Slooh
Pros: Real-time astronomy; actual telescopes to control; group collaborations; no experience necessary.
Cons: High cost for casual use; limited number of Quests; many text-heavy resources.
Bottom Line: If it's in the budget, Slooh provides an invaluable, unprecedented solution for applied science study, easy astronomy study, research, and the opportunity to practice astrophotography.
Teachers can create a classroom (or private Club) for their students to have a safe, private area to collaborate on projects, see and comment on each other's observations, ask and answer questions, and find their assigned Quests and other learning materials. Teachers can also keep close track of student progress there. Getting the most out of Slooh will take some time, though no previous astronomy experience is necessary. Just make sure to orient yourself before introducing it in the classroom.
Since students will be waiting for telescope time for their Missions (hours or sometimes days), make the most of the time in between by assigning students Guides to read, Shows to watch, and other tasks like participating in the community. Schedule Missions and then research what your class will be seeing. Encourage students to use the site from home as well, since some Missions will be scheduled at night. Slooh is an ideal tool for an after-school astronomy club if you can't devote much class time to it. And even if astronomy isn't a subject you anticipated covering in-depth, the tool itself makes science relevant and lets students apply knowledge directly and tangibly, which is a great experience in itself.
Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Slooh is an astronomy resource and tool that allows students to learn about astronomy, night sky objects, science history, and astrophotography/image processing. It includes both a large collection of experts and fellow community members who all collaborate and share their findings. Slooh has several different types of large telescopes for use by their subscribers -- located in Chile and in the Canary Islands with new ones coming in 2020 in UAE. Users can look at whatever the telescopes are focused on, or they can reserve time in the future -- as a Mission -- to direct one to something specific for their five- or 10-minute reserved time slot. All users can capture images from telescopes that are currently online, whether during one of their own Missions or someone else's. Captured images automatically save to their own Photo Roll, and users can share their observations with others or download them in PNG or FITS format.
Supporting all these features is a vast array of Guides covering all aspects of astronomy, such as space objects, history, telescopes, and image processing. Perfect for classrooms, the Quests provide resource materials and challenge students to capture certain kinds of astronomy images using Slooh's telescopes. Slooh has gathered some of the most interesting space objects in the Slooh 1000, which students can read about and easily discover through the telescopes. Users can also watch astronomy-based Shows and use the Ask an Astronomer feature to ask questions.
There's an extremely active community on the site filled with professional and amateur astronomers alike. Users can share their observations, help each other, or join public or private Clubs for those with similar interests. Through participation in the site, users earn badges and Gravity Points, many of which are given for actions that contribute to the larger Slooh community. As users level up, they move through levels named after famous astronomers, starting at the beginner level -- Ptolemy -- and going all the way up to the top level, Edwin Hubble.
Slooh offers relevant, applied science that grows with a student's interests and is almost limitless in learning potential. Even after students exhaust the materials, they can design their own projects, keep participating in the Clubs, and practice astrophotography.
Within Guides and Quests, students can learn in a self-directed way, reading, answering questions, and capturing night sky images that fulfill a Quest's requirements, then analyzing the results. When students study informational pages about night sky objects, they can access a ton of information, including recent observations, upcoming Missions, and related Quests and Shows. And they can save any of these things in their personal list for easy reference later. If students set up a Mission, the image processing settings are already set for them, but if they point the telescope using Catalog or Coordinate Missions, they can experiment with the presets. In terms of the scientific process, students learn that, even with high-end equipment, they're totally dependent upon the availability of telescope reservation slots and weather conditions, so they'll have to practice patience along the way.
If you're interested in learning about astronomy, especially at a deep level, Slooh is a great resource, eliminating the need for specialized equipment, local dark skies, or reference manuals, and there are experts and community members always available to help. There's a lot of self-directed learning to be had here. But, when in doubt, students have the Ask an Astronomer option for posing their questions to the experts.
Learning Rating
Not for Kids
Equipment is very spotty. During the close Mars approach their best planetary scope's red filter was missing, so all images were black and white. Now, at opposition, it's Jupiter. They filters were ruining every image and they just pulled them. Black and White Jupiter. I've never seen a hardware problem that they fixed inside two years. As of 5/2024 their main planetary 'scope, Canary 4 has worked about 10 days out of the last five years. The hardware was shot for about another five years until they took it out of service for maintenance. After two years it came back online and was really, really good...until they had "dome issues" and it went back offline for another year. Then everything was fixed and it was back...for 10 days. As of this writing it has been another two years with no updates. People have had entire year's memberships start and expire without it ever being online, no refunds offered, no apologies given, and the weekly SLOOH update has never mentioned it. "What's new at SLOOH?" Yeah, why would that mention hardware that everyone depends on that has been offline for years now.
So, just keep marketing. Celebrating the local total solar eclipse I was appalled how they could take a once in a lifetime miracle to observe and turn it into another slimy marketing promo. For the first hour of coverage they only talked about SLOOH programs like "quests" and then cut to incompetent, fawning schills. For children? Yeah, I want my kids' experience of a once in a lifetime event to be trashed by Paul Cox's marketing song and dance. That creature is lower than a snake's belly in a road rut.
Canary 2 had a shutter issue that ruined images for the better part of a decade, that just now has been fixed. Canary 3 never has visible planets in the drop-down choice box, just "Jovian Satellites". Chile 3 has never been online. The image quality for most of their telescopes is much poorer than the hardware would indicate, because their CCD cameras are ancient. They constantly "upgrade" the software with stupid marketing ploys, like "Roll Call" and some gibberish they put on the loading page because it takes forever to load. Twice. "Focusing gravitational lenses. Altering gravitational constant". Be honest and at least add, "Spinning marketing BS". They advertise as an educational tool; how is that educational to spew gibberish to kids??? Laziest programmers around. A function like "download all my images"...impossible. THOUSANDS of scripts that will crash almost any phone. I guess that doesn't figure into the WOT trustworthiness score. Yeah, you can trust it. To not work right. The woman that does some of the audio (Kochava Yerushalmit, I believe) has the most irritating fake Brit accent I've ever heard. They had a special event for the last major conjunction and were overwhelmed with traffic- thank to their adverts- that none of it was ever available. They've conditioned young users to become marketers. Hardly a post doesn't have an "!" in it or a cutesy title. Most forum posts are buried unless SLOOH marketers like it.
They are tagged as "trending" and "recommended". If one person likes it, it becomes "hot". The rest have to be manually selected to appear. And then every time you go back to the base forum screen they're gone again until you deliberately ask for them to be displayed.
The CFO is a former Safeway programmer and their head IT guy is a former airline programming project manager pretending he can program. Their only real programmer says his wish in life is to "shoot Muslims with dirty beards in the face". I'm not sure they're still there- what I'm telling you is based on 25 years of inside contact with them. I am a contractor, which is how I know what is going on. And they gave me a free account to use on development projects, so I know how it works.
Bottom line, it's cheap. Very cheap compared to actual remote telescope sites. That's the only way they survive.
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