Slashdot Mirror
GLORIA To Give Amateur Astronomers Access To Robotic Telescopes
Zothecula writes with an excerpt from a Gizmag article: "Amateur astronomers wanting to observe celestial bodies soon won't be limited to just their own personal telescopes, or visits to the local public observatory. Starting next year, the first in a worldwide network of robotic telescopes will be going online, which users from any location on the planet will be able to operate for free via the internet. Known as GLORIA (GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array for e-Science), the three-year European project will ultimately include 17 telescopes on four continents, run by 13 partner groups from Russia, Chile, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland and Spain. Not only will users be able to control the telescopes from their computers, but they will also have access to the astronomical databases of GLORIA and other organizations."
Old old old old news
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/imagepro.html
Scroll down to "remote access telescope projects"
This seems to only list "free" options, I donno how you miss GRAS. To a first approximation GRAS is cheap enough compared to owning to be "free".
http://www.global-rent-a-scope.com/gras-news/tag/remote-telescopes
I have always been into the AAVSO and have always had this desire to do CCD photometry, or at least for a decade or so since it became easy to do. The plan has been to rent time on a scope, and if I really like it, I'll drop four or so figures on the exact same model. Rent before buy.
Or I'll run the rental for awhile until I get sick of it and swear off the hobby forever. I've never done it, always planned to "when I have time".
Kind of like how I rented a Cessna 172 for many hours but thankfully never bought one outright (given that I don't do the private pilot thing anymore, it would have been a huge money loss)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This isn't as big a jump as the summary suggests. There are amateurs who sometimes get access to large telescopes, and one can do decent in system astronomy with backyard telescopes. Similarly, a lot of the observation of the recent supernova in M85 were done by amateur astronomers. Since one of the most important things to determine about a supernova is how the brightness rises and falls, for close by supernova it is very important to have near continual observation with a lot of data points. Since there are a lot of amateur astronomers out there this means that even when a major telescope doesn't have a good view of the event they can still see it. Also, while not amateurs in the sense of adults, similar programs to give telescope time to highschool and college students exist. Significant discoveries from that sort of work have been discussed on Slashdot before. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/068250/18-Year-Old-Student-Discovers-Comet-Break-Up.