Type of site Service provider Alexa rank 46,102 (April 2014) | Website slooh.com Commercial Yes | |
Owner Michael Paolucci (Founder) Slogan(s) Your Live Online Observatory | ||
Slooh is a robotic telescope service that can be viewed live through a web browser with Flash plug-in. It was not the first robotic telescope, but it was the first that offered "live" viewing through a telescope via the web. Other online telescopes traditionally email a picture to the recipient. The site has a patent on their live image processing method. Slooh is an online astronomy platform with live-views and telescope rental for a fee. Observations come from a global network of telescopes located in places including Spain and Chile.
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The name Slooh comes from the word "slew" to indicate the movement of a telescope, modified with "ooh" to express pleasure and surprise.
History
The service was founded in 2002 by Michael Paolucci. As of October 2009, Paolucci remains as chairman. The service went online December 25, 2003 but was not available to the public until 2004.
Participating observatories
The original astronomical observatory is located on the island Tenerife in the Canary Islands on the volcano called Teide. The site is at the 2,300-metre (7,500 ft) elevation and situated away from city light pollution. This (Canary Islands) site includes 2 domes, each with 2 telescopes. Each dome has a high-magnification telescope and a wide-field telescope. One dome is optimized for planetary views (e.g., more magnification and a different CCD), and the other is optimized for deep sky objects (e.g., less magnification, more light sensitive CCD). Each dome offers 2 telescopic views: one high magnification (narrow field) view through a 14-inch (360 mm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope; and a wide view through either a telephoto lens or an APO refractor. On September 23, 2012, the Slooh.com Canary Islands Observatory was assigned observatory code G40 by the Minor Planet Center for the reporting of asteroids, comets and other solar system small-bodies.
On February 14, 2009, Slooh launched a second observatory in the hills above La Dehesa, Chile. This site offers views from the Southern Hemisphere.
Unlike Google Sky which features images from the Hubble Space Telescope, Slooh can take new images of the sky with its telescopes.