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Ultimate Webcam: Rent Time On A CCD Telescope

Posted by timothy on from the work-for-hire dept.

leighklotz writes "I saw an ad for this in Science News and visited the site: http://www.arnierosner.com offers CCD-based telescopes that you control, from his mountaintop in Arizona. $50 for an hour's tiem gets you started. Too bad I hadn't read this last week when Saturn's rings were at their peak." I bet this gives some entrepreneurial ideas ...

3 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Why Bother? by flopsy+mopsalon · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So you pay 50 dollars to get a jpg of a celestial phenomenon. Why bother, when there are plenty of much better quality images of pretty much the whole sky (not to mention Hubble pictures, etc) to be downloaded for free? It's not like you can photograph the crab nebula from different angles or something.

  2. why bother posting on slashdot by rebelcool · · Score: 5, Insightful
    when you know nothing about the topic being discussed?

    There are plenty of astronomical phenomena which you cannot get pictures (at least not good ones) available for free. If you're a serious amateur astronomer (as this caters to), and are interested in investigating a particular area of space in detail, you need some damn good photos.

    Damn good photos are not available to public, and they are not cheap. Professional astronomers pay hundreds of dollars for a few shots of an eclipsing binary system they may be studying. If you're an amateur who wants this kind of thing, its simply not available.

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  3. coolness by 1fitz2many · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is probably noteworthy because of the coolness factor. A good site and well-cooled imaging arrays are not so easy to come by at an amateur level, so if you don't want to invest heavily in hardware, you can try a few things to see if they suit your taste. I would imagine that most buyers aim at targets for "pretty pictures," instead of for some home-brewed science project.

    From a strictly scientific perspective, it's probably not cost-effective to run a research project from a site like this. First of all, most astromonomical research requires some amount of spectroscopy. Of course, looking at a spectrum isn't as visually stunning (to some of us) as an awesome Hubble photo.

    But, we must keep in mind that important science can be done from the ground. Ever found a supernova, asteroid, or comet? There are several unmanned, robotic telescopes around the world that are constantly searching the skies for just these types of object. This is the sort of thing that a hacker with a few bucks to spare (for equipment) could get into.