Previous discussions on remote telescopes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741078
Telescope Ranchers
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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:
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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 * 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)
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"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...>
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: 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 o…
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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#46Really 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.
> 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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#47What do people do with this astronomical data? Why do they pay for this?
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
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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#48> from as little as 99 USD a month > 550 telescopes So about ~55 to 60k USD a month to just have some telescopes on your land? Nice little earner.
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 doe…
Customer support. Don't forget customer support.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#49> from as little as 99 USD a month > 550 telescopes So about ~55 to 60k USD a month to just have some telescopes on your land? Nice little earner.
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 doe…
> 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.
Re: Telescope Ranchers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.