For all of you who might be thinking about going for the Galileo Club award of the Astronomical League. I send a letter requesting clarification because the Galileoscope did not meet the requirements for the Club Award. Here the reply I received:

Dear Theo,
It’s true that the main eyepiece delivers 25x, or 50x when used with the included 2x Barlow lens. But it’s also true, as explained on our Specifications page (https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/content/specifications#accessories), that you can use the lens from the Barlow as a Galilean eyepiece providing 17x, an upright image, and a VERY narrow field of view (just like Galileo’s telescopes).

Also, since the Galileoscope has a 1.25-inch focuser, you can use a 25-mm eyepiece (typical of the low-power eyepiece that comes with many commercial telescopes) to achieve a magnification of 20x.

More to the point of the Galileo Pin, though, Galileo made his key discoveries with telescopes giving magnifications of 20x to 30x. (His discovery of the moons of Jupiter was made at 30x, for example.) So I’d suggest that you could change the rules for the Galileo Pin to allow observations up to 30x, in which case the Galileoscope is ideal!

Thanks for your interest in our little project. Clear skies!

Rick Fienberg
Galileoscope, LLC