Slooh has a Club Membership

[Sureshks]

Hi all,

As some of you know, Slooh is an online astronomy platform with live-views and telescope rental for a fee. It has become, perhaps, the best known of these services. Since their start in 2003, the business has really grown. They also provide educational materials, free live-sky feeds, observing lists and other services.

Here's a link to their homepage: https://www.slooh.com/

This is information on the telescopes that they have online for their members to use:

"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 February 14, 2009, Slooh launched a second observatory in the hills above La Dehesa, Chile. This site offers views from the Southern Hemisphere." Slooh enables its members to take images of the sky with these telescopes.

Here's more info on their mission:

"Since 2003, Slooh has enabled people to explore the universe together through its global network of telescopes. Slooh’s automated observatories develop celestial images in real-time for broadcast to the Internet. Slooh members have taken over 4m photos/150,000 FITS of over 50,000 celestial objects, participated in numerous discoveries with leading astronomical institutions and made over 3,000 submissions to the Minor Planet Center. Slooh’s flagship observatories are situated on Mt. Teide, in partnership with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), and in Chile, in partnership with the Catholic University. Slooh has also broadcast live celestial events from partner observatories in Arizona, Japan, Hawaii, Cypress, Dubai, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and many more. Slooh’s free live broadcasts of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), comets, transits, eclipses, solar activity etc. feature narration by astronomy experts Paul Cox and Bob Berman and are syndicated to media outlets worldwide. Slooh signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA in March 2014 to “Bring the Universe to Everyone and Help Protect Earth, Too.”"

The reason why I brought this up is that an annual single Slooh membership (called the "Apprentice" level) is $100/yr. However, they also have a Club membership. For $500 a year, it looks like 10 Apprentice licenses are provided. For $1000/yr, 30 licenses are available.

Slooh Memberships/Perks: https://vega.slooh.com/docs/Slooh_Membership_Matrix.png

I was curious if there would be enough interest for 10-30 MAS members to sign up and pay for a Club Membership ($33-$50/member/yr depending on the level), to gain access to what Slooh offers.

Does anyone have a Slooh membership who can better explain the services and how well it works?

Suresh

[sandconp]

I was signed up for the $4.95 a month membership which allowed me to look at the Slooh 500.

I have since let my membership lapse since I was not getting very good images. I did find the events and talks interesting but I did not like the long waits for the telescopes.