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jimmy76615 18 hours ago [-]
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.
js2 17 hours ago [-]
Nothing stopping you from buying a few scopes, sending them to him, then subletting access. :-)
gehsty 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jjav 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bluGill 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
db48x 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rkagerer 16 hours ago [-]
You mean AaaS (Astronomy as a Service)
theresistor 16 hours ago [-]
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.
So about ~55 to 60k USD a month to just have some telescopes on your land? Nice little earner.
thatoneengineer 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Aaargh20318 4 hours ago [-]
> Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5 hours ago [-]
Customer support. Don't forget customer support.
rtkwe 13 hours ago [-]
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.
js2 17 hours ago [-]
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.
orbital-decay 18 hours ago [-]
Far from unique! There were and are telescope hosters in the Atacama Desert, which is as good as it can possibly be for the amateurs.
I want to get it pointing out overflights and satellites by name, but I'm not there yet.
asxndu 18 hours ago [-]
What do people do with this astronomical data?
Why do they pay for this?
js2 17 hours ago [-]
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.
asxndu 17 hours ago [-]
Cool, makes sense.
whartung 14 hours ago [-]
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.
gehsty 12 hours ago [-]
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
bonesss 5 hours ago [-]
I saw an interview with the owner, one point he brought up in addition to atmospheric clarity is that many people need a long travel time to get away from light pollution, reducing available nights even further.
thatoneengineer 17 hours ago [-]
Why do people get into birdwatching?
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.
solomonneas 19 hours ago [-]
I would never have thought of this, but it is really cool. Living in the city with light pollution, we can see a dozen or so on the best nights.
What an ingenious business idea.
theresistor 16 hours ago [-]
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!
gehsty 12 hours ago [-]
Modern stacking algo negate this entirely for amateur photographers
elictronic 19 hours ago [-]
Colter Mccorkindale’s comment is the best part.
“Sooo....the stars at night really are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas?”
genpfault 20 hours ago [-]
Not, in fact, optical interferometry :(
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
sadly won't be possible for anything serious next decade as each space trillionaire and country launches their own 10,000+ constellations
sky will be constantly twinkling, will be weird
we'll have to switch to space telescopes above LEO
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.
theresistor 15 hours ago [-]
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.
dredmorbius 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Retric 9 hours ago [-]
That’s an option. However, these satellites provide a predictable path so you don’t needed to detect them from image data. Which means you can even prevent them from showing up on long analog film exposures.
db48x 2 hours ago [-]
It’s worth noting that the latest trillionaire lowered launch costs by ~10×. It has never been cheaper to launch a telescope into space. I’m surprised that no universities have launched their own space observatories. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, but all they ever seem to spend it on is more administrators. They could launch a dozen space telescopes without making a dent.
zippyman55 19 hours ago [-]
I’m seeking funding to open up a rail gun ranch where you can sit in your lawn chair and blow satellites out of the sky.
pfdietz 14 hours ago [-]
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.)
zippyman55 10 hours ago [-]
I know you are joking on this one, as I was on mine. But with people being arrested for shining pet toy lasers at objects, best everyone stay clear of this one.
ninjalanternshk 13 hours ago [-]
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.
zippyman55 13 hours ago [-]
I like where you are going with this. Can you offer “hardened” drones for the advanced players?
tedd4u 19 hours ago [-]
Probably legal in Texas? If it's directly over "your land?"
dylan604 19 hours ago [-]
If your application says it is meant to hunt feral hogs, then they will allow it.
zippyman55 16 hours ago [-]
This may be a good plan B pivot! Join now and get a free lawn chair!
throwup238 19 hours ago [-]
Feral hogs IN SPAAAAACE!
adrianN 19 hours ago [-]
Kessler‘s farm?
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
I'm thinking of "space roombas" that glide around and bump all the sats in LEO into the atmosphere like a game of pool
Only problem is they are toxic as they burn up and create a lot of pollution
(too bad gravity is impossible to overcome cheaply or do the opposite and yeet into sun)
dredmorbius 12 hours ago [-]
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"
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.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271108
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741078
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.
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 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.
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!
“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
https://satellitemap.space
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.
(Note: this is not an actual suggestion this be done.)
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...>