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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It's cool and I think I'll order one, but they missed an opportunity in not offering a way to connect a digital camera to the scope, which would vastly increase awareness of what can be done with it. Of course, people will find ways to hack it together; but given the cost and size of digital camera technology I'm really surprised they're not offering a $79.99 imaging head with a USB cable hanging out back.

Still, well done.

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It's not hard to take photos through any telescope. See the Galileoscope pool on Flickr for some examples: http://www.flickr.com/groups/galileoscope/pool/

Errr.. the whole point of this scope is to duplicate the optics that Galileo himself had to deal with. A web cam would be sort of self-defeating.

In any case, cheap cameras give very poor results, but if you want to try one you can always do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9khTIkwNmW8

Well, it's not - that's why they include an achromatic lens element to reduce color fringing as well as an (optional) rectifying eyepiece. Microscope eyepiece cams aren't too pricey on eBay and might deliver better results than a consumer cam.

I can see a lot of cool little science fair projects with something like this, not all for astronomy either, eg mount 2 of them in parallel and build a stereoscopic analysis tool.

"Duplicate" was a poor choice of words, I'm trying to say that the point of the scope is to give kids the same experience that Galileo had.

I mean, yes, they opted for a modern achromatic lens - they also chose plastic instead of wood - but that doesn't change the basic point of the scope.

could a point and shoot camera be hacked together with this? that+netbook would make for a very cool project.

For sure. There's actually a pic on their web page (https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/content/frequently-asked-que...) made by just holding one up to the lens. Your biggest difficulty would be make a plate to mount both the scope and the camea. But I was thinking of something involving plastic tubing, glue, and one of those little USB microscope cameras.

yeah...I don't think you'd get very good fidelity just holding the camera up...maybe some sort of camera mount on the back end and make it modular where you could go back and forth between naked eye and taking pictures...I think I'm going to try this with a usb webcam and netbook first.

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