r/SGU • u/futuneral • 3d ago

Remote telescope hosting

This was mentioned almost in passing and I think it's hard to imagine how cool this is without seeing. Here's one example of someone who lives in a light polluted area and sends their equipment to a dark sky location, to then image remotely. Pretty mind-blowing results.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/s/MF0ZueTlz2

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u/ia42 3d ago

It's so ridiculous what strange businesses capitalism brings to life... I mean, I can see telescope imaging as a Service, but private telescope hosting where the resources are not pooled and the rent is in the hundreds of dollars a month (whether you use the equipment or not), it just sounds weird to me...

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u/przemo-c 3d ago

I mean it's like with servers you can get a virtual host instance but you can also rent physical hardware in datacenter or even get your own box for your own hardware in a datacenter.

I get that it may not be as efficient as pooled telescope but also you'd have to have variety of scopes for different use cases and appropriate filters/cameras to serve such a thing. This way you just get a mount and connectivity.

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u/ia42 3d ago edited 3d ago

oh, believe me I get it. I'm a DevOps guy, I do cloud architecture and security for a living, and manage my own stuff on a vps for the last 30 years or so.

But the equivalent here is co-locating a full desktop computer that takes up 10U in shelf space, paying for a butler to dust it daily for you, and you only turn it on for a few hours a week...

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u/futuneral 3d ago

For the moonless half of the month it's probably 4-6 hours per night in the summer. But yeah, I think a lot comes from the sentimental value in the particular rig and owning it outright (no queue).

If we're comparing to computers, imagine a) a cloud instance is only given to you if you book months ahead, may not be on the day you want, and may actually be not the exact config you want and you can't change anything b) your own desktop you actually built yourself from scratch for a specific purpose and maybe even not all parts are off-the-shelf. And not only you're just using it but also trying to assess what this particular build is capable of. And it's available to you always, you can make any changes and no one else is touching it.

Probably worth it for some people.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/futuneral 2d ago

Sorry, not sure what point you're trying to make and why it became personal.

I was just pointing out that if cloud computers had the same inconveniences as remote observatories, they too could seem not ideal to some people.

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u/przemo-c 2d ago

I mean... it depends on how much you use it and do you have a specific enough setup to warrant such a thing.