Remote hosting for your telescope

Telescope datacenter, what a cool concept.

Is this for hobbyists or industrial use?

Obligatory comment that bray fals has been caught making up data ie, using Photoshop to paint detail in fals-1, the supposed new discovery that was actually already in some survey data.

Fun fact, Bray was the second jtw trident user in North America. I think I was the first.

Also, bit weird you can't come set up your own telescope.

Telescopes are pretty common for this, but lab equipment is too. Universal particle accelerators and stuff

Factories & Food Delivery Kitchens

Medical device manufacturing, kind of.

amateur radio antenna farms also

Solar panel collectives.

Try to see if there’s a local astronomy club. They tend to routinely have field nights where folks bring their equipment out, point it at something interesting and let the public engage in the activity.

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.

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

     • dark skies: 21.80 Mag/ArcSec²
     • 290 clear nights each year

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.

I think it's more for astrophotography enthusiasts where the hobby is more about getting good photography setups than looking at stars yourself

Yes, https://www.itelescope.net/

Looks like it. From the For Sale page: "Some clients are looking for telescope sharing arrangements."