Slooh

I discovered a great site recently: slooh.com.  This is an astronomy site where you can control robotic telescopes located in the Canary Islands and Chile.  The whole thing is setup is a type of game, where you earn points for making observations, going on missions, and completing quests.  I've only been using it for about a week, but it's been awesome so far.  Digging into the quests has been much more of a learning experience than I was expecting.  I had no idea what a planetary nebula was before, and now I've been able to recognize one just looking at the picture!  I have to admit, it's been tough to pull myself away at night to work on Radwave...

One of the great things about it is showing it to my kids.  Since the Canary Islands are a handful of hours ahead of me, we're able to get some great night time observations together during our daylight hours when my kids are still awake.  The audio streams on some of the missions has completely fascinated my son, too.  It's honestly enthralling.

From what I've seen so far, this seems like a complementary service to what I hope to turn Radwave into.  Slooh enables people around the world to collaboratively, and somewhat competitively, explore images of space.  In doing so, these individuals are able to take part in a wonderful experience of discovery, learning and teaching.  The goal with Radwave is quite similar, but instead of optical imagery, radio spectrum.  So those individuals who see something curious in an image could use Radwave to peer at it through a radio lens to see if maybe there's something additional to observe.

Hope to see you on Slooh!  I'm NickR0.2021.  Happy exploring!