Saturday, June 30, 2007

Galileo Astronomy Stores - Formidable!

On my just completed trip to Munich, Germany and the south coast of France, I had a chance to visit GALILEO, a cool astronomy store in Hyères (Provence), one of a chain of stores in several cities in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. If you live in Europe and are interested in astronomy, it’s well worth a visit to one of these stores. They have a wide range of telescopes and astronomical accessories, including some large and high-end telescopes and domes. Their store web sites have a lot of useful information (in French or German, or English if you choose the Brussels store).

They also have an interesting product for day time astronomy, the SolarScope. With the help of clear and cloud-free skies, I got to try out the larger version of this safe and easy to use device for viewing the Sun. It projected a large and clear image of the Sun (only a single small sunspot happened to be visible at the time). It’s available in Europe and the U.S. through the SolarScope web site (there are several models differing in size and materials). I ordered one of the larger educational versions to use for day-time astronomy demos and to be ready for the next solar eclipse.

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