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.
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.
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.
I'm sure it's a lot of work for him, mostly maintenance and cleaning. Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him-- that can't be trivial and probably means he doesn't break even on a given telescope for a few months at least. Plus whatever it costs him to recruit new customers.
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.
I think it's literally just the pier, power and an ethernet connection provided and you use the software of the mount and image sensor combo you own through their internet.
He's got 10 barns with retractable roofs to maintain, plus he offers maintenance of the scopes themselves. On top of that, it sounds like a full time business he's running. But yeah, a very nice business.
Astrophotography is a hobby like any other. People enjoy capturing their own images of the universe.
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'm putting one of the modern "Smart Scopes" on my Christmas list this year.
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.
To get into Astrophotographg you probably need to spend £2-3k for some equipment, if you are based somewhere like the north of England this translates to a handful of clear nights per year. Sending your equipment here gives you an order of magnitude more clear nights.
I wouldn’t do this as I like the fact my photos are taken in my back yard but each to their own
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.
You’d be amazed what even a small smart telescope can see even in Bortle 9 urban skies.
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!
You misunderstand the issue. It’s a significant problem for some kinds of observations and largely irrelevant to others.
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.
In most amateur imaging you can trade time for quality. By stacking enough images, satellite trails get averaged out of the final image.
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.
Averaging isn't the only option. It's possible to use other image-processing techniques which look at outlier values. This is way outside my area of expertise, but I believe sigma clipping is one of the standard go-tos, see:
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.
Lasers would probably be more practical. Maybe a whole array of lasers w. telescopes? At (say) 500 km, a 20 cm aperture would have a spot size of maybe 50 cm. So let's take that telescope array, hook a kW laser to each one, and roast some LEO satellites?
(Note: this is not an actual suggestion this be done.)
I’m working on a DaaS startup (drone as a service) so maybe I’ll locate next to you and your customers can blow drones out of the sky and mine will keep having to replace theirs.
If you have to yeet space trash to a gravitational well, Jupiter is probably the more attractive option. Lower delta-V, still a large well, and so long as you get reasonably close, orbital decay should solve the problem eventually.
For de-orbiting LEO satellites, electrodynamic tethers is probably the most viable active method:
"Study on electrodynamic tether system for space debris removal"