600/month
good for whomever that’s a cheap price lol, but I think if you’re a regular earning-ish person you would rather host the telescope in your own backyard
600/month
good for whomever that’s a cheap price lol, but I think if you’re a regular earning-ish person you would rather host the telescope in your own backyard
The backyard option is only feasible if you live somewhere without light pollution and clear skies, which is not most people.
$600/month is a reasonable deal if comparing it to driving couple of times a month to a dark sky location near you.
While it is fun and rewarding to be camping and hiking like that, the effort gets in the way of serious amateur astronomy.
Amateur astronomy is one of the few hobby science fields left where real contributions can be made and published without being a professional astronomer.
It really depends what your goals/targets are. You can still do a lot with narrowband filters that make light pollution a minimal concern.
One of my favorite images was taken from a resort balcony with my telescope directly under a fluorescent light (pretty bright, probably a 75W equivalent) with plenty of other lights along the building and sidewalk below. I used an Optolong L-eXtreme filter.
I always show people the picture of the telescope setup first (which includes a fully-lit cruise ship passing in the background), get the, “Why did you even bother bringing a telescope to Aruba if there wasn’t anywhere good to use it?” reaction, then show my final image of the Lagoon nebula.
At home it’s not as bad, but there’s still a streetlight about 50 meters away, plus the neighbors’ deck lights…yet I don’t need to care about that at all.
Bonus, not fumbling around in almost complete darkness makes things so much easier when setting up and breaking down the gear.
you can't not link to your photograph of the lagoon nebula after all that :)
There's some wild stuff included though, roll-off roof enclosures over your telescope, gigabit symmetrical fiber on a mountain. Included a couple hours a month of specialized tech support.
Like it's definitely not for an occasional hobbyist but if it's your main hobby... it sounds kinda neat.
I could imagine $600/mo. being burned on more mundane hobbies like video games.
Most backyards don't get
You can rent out viewing time on your remote telescope using services such as https://www.itelescope.net/ (you can search for telescopes hosted at SRO).
I wouldn’t expect it to be a massively profitable side hustle though.
Better skies, less light pollution, already built observatory houses to cover during the day, no space/not allowed to build in your own back yard, etc. loads of reasons to go with a hosted solution instead of building one in your own back yard.
If you've got some cheap dob with no tracking it makes sense to do it in your backyard (where the point is to look through eyepiece, not take photos), but $20 per night for everything but the actual scope at a high quality site is pretty good deal. I would expect given the other outlays to get a scope plus camera worth this site to be pretty large (e.g. at least 50k), so this is going to be a club or a school level thing, not an individual.
For comparison, pre-covid (so the cost has likely gone up quite a bit now) it was $200 a night for a 2m-class telescope and $1200 a night for a 4m-class telescope at a similar-ish site.
That's a pretty reasonable price. Most are around $800
How much remote hands time does that include per month?
I’m guessing these still need ‘manual’ tweaking at times.
Yeah looks very expensive unless I can pay say a day.
This service is for hosting your own remote controlled telescope, not short term rental of a shared telescope (think colo. vs cloud provider)