Speaker
Description
The public observing nights at the Anton Pannekoek Institute are fully booked every month. With the arrival of corona, we moved our events online, like so many others. This served those who were interested in theory, but not those who came to us because they wanted a glimpse of the night sky through a real telescope. To still be able to serve (and expand) this part of our audience, we teamed up with the local library and started loaning out small telescopes, using the US based Library Telescope as an example. Unique in the Netherlands, soon the wait list stretched until the summer of 2022, so we quickly expanded to 4 telescopes in 4 different library locations in Amsterdam. Since then, a few other observatories have also started loaning out telescopes in local libraries and preparations are in place for even more. This talk will discuss how the project came to be and will give some pointers for future library telescope holders.
