I’ve become involved with slooh.com a company that owns telescopes on the Canary Islands and in Chile and rents time to amateurs interested in using great equipment. It’s all Internet driven.
They also do webcasts whenever celestial conditions warrant. I host.
Tonight we were on for the Saturn opposition. The Sun,Earth and Saturn are aligned. Saturn is its photographically prettiest.
If you think of this as a sports broadcast, my color man was Bob Berman, an astronomer who lives in New York City’s northern exurbs. I asked questions and tried to keep the show on track.
Some of slooh’s webcasts have been viewed over a million times. Many in the high hundreds of thousands. The audience varies dependent on the excitement of the event. Tonight wasn’t a barn burner. We did show Saturn live through the Canary Islands scope.
There’s a very good opportunity with more ‘show biz appeal’ coming up on May 24. We’ll be plowing through the debris field of a comet, 209p/LINEAR. A meteor shower–possibly a meteor storm!
It’s safe. The comet itself won’t be nearby. Meteors from showers never hit the Earth’s surface. They streak across the sky as they vaporize in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.
I’ll be on for that. We should have lots of images to show.