Not for Kids

My Take

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.