"We get orders from schools, planetariums and education researchers all over." "We ran an ad in Astronomy Magazine back in January and we haven't been able to keep up with demand," Sadler said. Sadler worked through legal and logistical details and bought the original patent from Janosik's widow Dale, who has received a stream of royalties from the newly remodeled Sunspotter ever since. "I knew when I first saw the Sunspotter it was a really unique concept that could really take off with some improvements and some marketing dollars." "The only way to view sunspots in the past was through a telescope with filters, which is always dangerous," Jane Sadler told UPI. Shortly after Janosik's death at age 50 in 1995, Jane Sadler began a two-year odyssey to acquire the Sunspotter patent and to improve upon the design, which was unsophisticated but had won fans nationwide. Sadler in turn introduced his wife Jane, president of Learning Technologies. "Phil Sadler was there and I told him he really needed to check it out." "About 10 years ago I took one to a workshop on science education," Berr said. They weren't asking for any payment upfront."īerr said the Sunspotter was "very crudely made but worked well" and he showed it to Phil Sadler, director of Harvard University's Center for Astrophysics science education program. "It gave a very short description of the telescope and then said if you like it, keep it and mail payment. "All it said was, 'Would you like to use a Sunspotter?'" Berr said. The Sunspotter came to Berr's attention through a postcard in the mail.
"He didn't do anything special to market it, just flyers. "He would take it around to different schools and colleges," Dale Janosik-Russell, the inventor's widow, said.
He ordered surplus filters and lenses from specialty suppliers and then marketed the early device to secondary schools and college science programs. of Hawley, Pa., who worked on the project in his garage using scrap plywood from a local lumbar yard. Sunspotter originally was designed in 1987 by Daniel Janosik Sr. If you add the rest of the rapidly changing solar-system sky area, I bet it doesn't add up to 20,000 square arcseconds on the average.Solar observations are important because sunspots and solar flares create measurable effects and sometimes havoc on Earth, Berr said, adding both phenomena can be viewed in "glorious detail" with the Sunspotter.
If you are looking for impermanent phenomena, things that won't be there a month or year from now, most of the nighttime changes consistently visible take place on Jupiter, which offers us less than 2000 square arcseconds of varying sky area. Of course, Venus is big but it doesn't offer much change except its phases, and the Moon is an awe-inspiring spectacle, albeit a fixed one except for changes in illumination angle. When most of us think of solar-system observing, we tend to imagine nighttime observing, generally consisting of planetary views of the cloud bands of Jupiter, looking to see if we can pick up any divisions in the outer rings of Saturn (or pastel ovals on its disk), unsatisfactory glimpses of the smaller planets, and occasional, too brief, squints at Mars as it whizzes past the Earth.
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