Telescope Ranchers
kottke.org
kottke.org
Yes.. this is an interesting philosophical question about the hobby.
If you just rent some time one someone else's telescope on some location you don't visit, to take some photos.. how different is that from simply looking at the photos on astrophotography websites, which will be better than anything you can do anyway (unless you spend insane amounts of time and money)? So what's the point?
I enjoy astrophotography but I don't have a good location nor great equipment. But my line in the sand is that anything I print out and frame on the wall has to be taken by me controlling my telescope while sitting next to it. Only that way it feels the effort is mine and the photo is mine, so I can feel proud of it. Even though the quality is far inferior to what I could download from the web. But I have a few really nice photos and I feel good about them.
Many astronomers work at yet another remove from operations. They don’t even take the pictures themselves! They collect data from other people’s observations instead! A lot of modern observatories collect so much data that there’s not enough people to look at everything in detail. Whole–sky observatories that take hundreds of photos to image the whole sky every night, satellite missions like GAIA that observed a billion stars to determine their position and velocities, etc, etc.
Right, but that's actual groundbreaking work, capturing image data that has never been captured before. The value there is in the work itself.
It's a different game for hobby astrophotography. Unless your budget is enormous, you're not going to every capture a photo that isn't already 10x better somewhere in https://app.astrobin.com/search
So what's the point then? I find it can be difficult to answer that question. There really isn't any point, other than the fun of the hobby. Why do I frame a photo of the Orion nebula that I took, which objectively is pretty much junk compared to everything in astrobin.com? Only because it has value to me because I took, but it doesn't really have any other value.
Maybe? That's the philosophical question IMO.
If I have a website interface controlling some remote scope where I set coordinates and click to capture and go to sleep, and tomorrow download an image, this is starting to feel pretty close to just pointing the web browser to astrobin and downloading an image.
> 550 telescopes
So about ~55 to 60k USD a month to just have some telescopes on your land? Nice little earner.
I bet he makes a good living on his labor and whatever capital he has tied up in the land, but it doesn't sound like an easy business.
As a backyard astrophotographer, this hardware and software is pretty much standard even if you don’t send your equipment to a remote site and is part of the kit you send to the remote site.
While you can still manually point your telescope if you wanted, I don’t think many who are in the hobby still do this. Most people will use so-called ‘GoTo’ mounts. You basically tell it where to point and it will automatically do so and keep tracking that location (to compensate for the rotation of our planet).
It’s a little bit more involved than I’m describing it but not much.
I'm currently doing observations of variable stars just for fun. Going to load up an observing plan for tonight shortly!
If you want to see my progress (mostly gated by the sky): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOgT48pM4GctL_nuv37vc...
I want to get it pointing out overflights and satellites by name, but I'm not there yet.
What an ingenious business idea.
I have one of the mentioned SeeStar smart telescopes, and have been quite successful in taking photos of both galaxies and nebulas from the rooftop of my apartment building in the middle of a city.
Sure, it takes time. Sure, it would be faster/better under darker skies. But it’s not impossible!
Why do they pay for this?
Most hobbies with gear have setup costs and it's not unusual for that to be in the several thousand dollar range, and maintenance costs. $100-400/month for a hobby isn't all that much and it gives you exclusive access to your own scope in ideal skies that you can operate from your home.
I had a friend with a 10" Meade with which not much happened. Just a bear to lug around and set up and mess with, not even including trying bumble through getting astrophotography started.
But the new-ish Smart Scopes looks fun and accessible, so gonna see if I can get one of those to play with.
I still have that scope. It's on a wedge mount with motorized but manual tracking. Even an 8" is a pain to drag out and you really have to be dedicated because it turns out most folks don't have the patience to spend much time outside looking through a 1.25" eye piece. So when you drag it out, expect to be spending alone time with you and the sky.
Still, I'm glad I have it. It's good for looking at the moon and planets, and the sun with correct filter. I still drag it out now and again. I'll never take the sorts of photos you can find easily on the internet. So I prefer to look at the universe with my own eyes. That's still exciting.
It's a hobby, there doesn't need to be much in the way of novel "data" for it to be rewarding. Though considering this guy found a nebula I wouldn't be surprised if there was some. The universe is big (citation needed) and good hobbyist telescopes are quite powerful; you have a lot of sky to explore and could easily be getting the best images ever of any particular patch of it.
I wouldn’t do this as I like the fact my photos are taken in my back yard but each to their own
“Sooo....the stars at night really are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas?”
sky will be constantly twinkling, will be weird
we'll have to switch to space telescopes above LEO
Only problem is they are toxic as they burn up and create a lot of pollution
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
(too bad gravity is impossible to overcome cheaply or do the opposite and yeet into sun)
For de-orbiting LEO satellites, electrodynamic tethers is probably the most viable active method:
"Study on electrodynamic tether system for space debris removal"
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...>
(Note: this is not an actual suggestion this be done.)
Satellites don’t include light sources and there’s nothing to illuminate them when in earth’s shadow. In order to interfere with light based astronomy they need to be outside of earths shadow and someone needs to be actively taking a picture of that chunk of sky. As these satellites orbit close to earth almost the entire sky is clear near solar midnight.
Major ground based telescopes can also add a shutter to block light detection for the fraction of a second a satellite would interfere. Basically at increasing magnification you’re looking at an ever smaller percentage of the sky which means the odds of a satellite, even one of millions, being in the shot for a given second is low. It’s still an issue, but being 99.X% as effective is good enough not to be a major concern.
Where it’s a concern is whole sky observation where you can’t easily add a shutter and losing a significant portion of the sky every night is a real problem. Amateur astronomy has the same basic options, but will often run into avoidable issues.
Very high end amateurs get pissy about it because they paid a lot of money for high end equipment to minimize imaging times, but for the rest of us it’s not a huge impediment as we already needed lots of subframes to get high SNR anyways.
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Sigma...>.
More generally, you're clipping outliers:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Clipp...>.
This applies not only to satellite tracks, but meteors, cosmic rays, and other artefacts introduced into image capture. The techniques should be generally applicable, though for those who are specifically exploring transitory phenomena, this introduces additional challenges.
Long exposures made sense when photgraphic plates were a scarce resource, and replacing them risked disturbing the observation.
Stacking is premised on the idea that individual exposures are cheap, and that noise tends to affect a small number of those exposures, in small regions. The same predictability of satellite tracks you name means that they can be removed through image processing rather than brute force (avoiding sky regions, physical masking, interrupting exposures during overflights, etc.).
And the other phenomena I mention (meteors, cosmic rays) are not predictable, and also degrade deep-space images.
A supernova peaks over the course of days, and fades slowly over months to years. They also remain static relative to the background stars, as do all astronomical phenomena outside our Solar System, even over the span of a day.[1]
Even a very-rapidly-peaking kilonova (neutron-neutron star collision) though they peak quite rapidly (short gamma-ray bursts, or SGBs, last about two seconds) have durable remnants lasting weeks.
The transient phenomena discussed here occur largely at the scale of a few seconds at most, often far less, and most move across a significant span of sky within that time.
More likely is that a meteor impact on the Moon (or other Solar System body) might be missed, but those are sufficiently small targets that interference such as we're discussing would not be a significant noise source. Space-based observation of, e.g., comet collisions with Jupiter or Saturn would eliminate LEO satellite noise entirely, though cosmic ray interference would remain a concern.
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Notes:
1. An object moving at 0.99c at the distance of the nearest star, 4 light years, would cover slightly less than 0.04 degrees per day. Much of the Universe is at somewhat greater distance than even this.
> A supernova peaks over the course of days
People do long exposures over hours and sometimes multiple days.
An algorithm assuming a static image could discard a relatively slow increase in brightness that shows up on say 10% of your samples.
So again not likely, but definitely something someone would prefer shows up despite being inconsistent.