Cheap Astronomy

Cheap Astronomy is based in:

What is Cheap Astronomy?

Cheap Astronomy is about exploring the universe. Maybe just with your eyes or maybe with binoculars or maybe even with an out-of-the-box department store telescope. Everything on the site is aimed at people who want to do real astronomy for under $300—and that includes $0.

Cheap Astronomers aren’t gear freaks. They like being able to park their car in the garage and they don’t like spending all night in a lonely field waiting to photograph some lunar occultation event.

Here at Cheap Astronomy, the goal is find interesting stuff to look at while you are walking the dog, maybe spot a red supergiant as you take out the garbage or admire the rings of Saturn through a bargain basement telescope. We’ve all got better things to do than fiddle about with CCDs and collimation techniques.

Cheap Astronomy is based in Canberra, Australia so most of the material here relates to what you can see in the southern sky. High level negotiations are under way to establish a world wide Cheap Astronomy Network—if it’s not too expensive or too much effort.

Galileoscope

As you may have heard on Astronomy Cast, cheap but good telescopes are available from an IYA project called Galileoscope for $15 US! And they do ship internationally (which was an extra $30 US to Australia—still a fair deal though).

Cheap Astronomy has one on order—review to come.

IE 8 update

Cheap Astronomy developed this website using a very small and squishy authoring product that is incompatible with IE 8. After little more than two hours a solution was found to enable the website to function nearly as well as it used to under IE 7. The trick is to ungroup the taskbar objects—meaning it now takes twice as long for the webpage to load—and the taskbar looks even more askew than it used to under Firefox and Safari.

But hey…you have to admit IE 8 is cheap.