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Comment by jimmy76615 | Hacker News Reader

Really great idea! But one still has to buy a telescope and send it to this guy, I think it would be cool if one could just rent everything at once. For non-serious people that have a lot of money that they would like to put to use looking at the stars. Or maybe a time-share like concept.

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Nothing stopping you from buying a few scopes, sending them to him, then subletting access. :-)

Astronomy arbitrage!?

Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.

> Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.

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.

I don’t think the telescope has to be sitting next to you. Actual astronomers take pictures remotely all the time. They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope when it’s their turn to take pictures with it, they put coordinates into a website. Even most ground–based observatories are often operated remotely. Many of them are visited by astronomers too, but more and more that’s an optional step.

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.

> They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope

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.

But surely the photo has the same value to you no matter how much effort it took. Sitting outside in the cold next to your telescope while you take the photo doesn’t make the picture more valuable than sitting inside at your computer taking the photo.

> But surely the photo has the same value to you no matter how much effort it took.

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.

The real gain is that you get to choose where and when to point the telescope. If you don't care this makes no sense. However if you get interested in anything other than the most common objects odds are nobody has good long term pictures of it. Even if you are a professional getting time on a big telescope when you want it is a problem.

Renting, controlling and taking the pics yourself is still a step more involved than just googling a picture of something. Comes down to how each person individually feels about how much that involvement is worth.

You mean AaaS (Astronomy as a Service)

It does exist: https://www.slooh.com

iTelescope does exactly what you’re outlining. There used to be a few others but I think they have mostly died out. I assume the economics don’t really work out.

It feels like a relatively small market niche, they're aiming for people interested enough in astronomy to pay for telescope time but not interested enough or unable to own their own scope in either their back yard or at a remote dark sky site.

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