astrobob0 ha scritto:
Il 2009 si stà avvicinando è l'anno internazionale dell'astronomia [cut]
secondo me l'iniziativa di maggior impatto è il Galileoscope:
http://www.astronomy2009.org/files/repo ... Report.pdf
riporto di seguito (ho messo il grassetto per evidenziare alcune parti):
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The goal of the IYA2009 Galileoscope Cornerstone Project has always been to come up with an inexpensive, good-quality telescope kit with which children and adults can view the targets that Galileo himself viewed 400 years ago, including the Moon, the naked-eye planets — with special attention to Jupiter’s Galilean moons and Saturn’s rings — and a few bright star clusters.
For that purpose, the Galileoscope Task Group (TG) and its US counterpart at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) have evaluated more than three dozen inexpensive telescope kits and preassembled telescopes available in North America, Europe, and Asia for less than
US$50/EUR33 each.
The TG concluded that the Galileoscope doesn’t already exist, so they have had to invent it.
The attention next turned to what, exactly, the specifications should be. After much discussion, including critical input from the community and from potential fundraisers, it was decided to pursue a kit similar to an easy-to-assemble Asian one, using a glass doublet objective, with a magnification of 45x and a field-of-view goal of 1.5°. This is enough power to show Saturn’s rings clearly and enough field to comfortably encompass the Pleiades. These specifications require that the telescope be used with a stable tripod or other mount, and they require that particular attention be paid to the eyepiece design to achieve the desired field width while providing comfortable eye relief for users who must wear eyeglasses while observing.
You may be wondering why we are not pursuing the route of building the lowest-cost telescope that can be distributed to the largest number of people. The main answer is that the educational motivation for the Galileoscope has evolved in a different direction and that
educational value is enhanced by more effective use of the telescopes rather than by maximizing their number. Thus the integrated value of the telescope over time relies strongly on the value of the educational materials to help students understand the principles behind it and to conduct extended observing programs (for example, determining the orbits of the Galilean satellites). The additional cost of such a Galileoscope over the original concept of a “cheapscope” is balanced by the value obtained by the more extended use of the telescope in educational programs, by its use by groups of students rather than only by individuals, and by the potential longer-term use of the telescope beyond the IYA2009 year.
Note that the telescope will have a built-in 1/4-20 tripod socket, so that it can be used with any standard camera tripod that the user may already own or have access to. The Galileoscope TG is also investigating appropriate aperture-end solar filters to be made available at extra (nominal) cost.
Finally the most important issue: the price. The price tag when we combine all the orders from the different countries in one large bulk purchase (of order 500,000 units) is expected to be in the neighborhood of US$10 per Galileoscope, not including an optional tripod (whose cost is still being evaluated). This cost is still under review from a manufacturing standpoint and does not include shipping/freight, which is another issue under continuing study. While this isn’t the “few dollars” we’d originally hoped for, it’s still a very significant reduction in cost relative to any
existing commercial telescope of comparable quality. Remember, too, that the Galileoscope will be placed into a solid educational context with supporting multilingual instructional material that will be included.>>
secondo me è un'iniziativa lodevole e potentissima (a livello pedagogico).
Se mantengono le promesse significa dare la possibilità ai ragazzi di avvicinarsi ad una
scienza fantastica al costo di un biglietto del cinema.
La cosa più fantastica, imho è che oggi con pochi euro si può mettere assieme uno strumento per cui Galileo avrebbe venduto sua madre (con tutto il rispetto). Speriamo sia anche questo un input per quelli "dei piani alti", affinchè capiscano che il cielo stellato è un patrimonio dell'umanità che va assolutamente riiconquistato.
ciao
dan
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