Remote hosting for your telescope
15 comments
·July 31, 2025fudged71
What are other examples of managed remote hosting of things that aren’t compute? I had considered this model for a 3D print farm years ago.
s0rce
Medical device manufacturing, kind of.
malfist
Telescopes are pretty common for this, but lab equipment is too. Universal particle accelerators and stuff
michaeldoron
This might be the smallest of marketing nitpickings, but the technical support is not free, it's complimentary for $600/month.
incognito124
Another telescope hosting service I heard about, based in Spain: https://www.pixelskiesastro.com/
yapyap
600/month
good for whomever that’s a cheap price lol, but I think if you’re a regular earning-ish person you would rather host the telescope in your own backyard
manquer
The backyard option is only feasible if you live somewhere without light pollution and clear skies, which is not most people.
$600/month is a reasonable deal if comparing it to driving couple of times a month to a dark sky location near you.
While it is fun and rewarding to be camping and hiking like that, the effort gets in the way of serious amateur astronomy.
Amateur astronomy is one of the few hobby science fields left where real contributions can be made and published without being a professional astronomer.
zokier
Most backyards don't get
• dark skies: 21.80 Mag/ArcSec²
• 290 clear nights each yearteamonkey
You can rent out viewing time on your remote telescope using services such as https://www.itelescope.net/ (you can search for telescopes hosted at SRO).
I wouldn’t expect it to be a massively profitable side hustle though.
dnemmers
How much remote hands time does that include per month?
I’m guessing these still need ‘manual’ tweaking at times.
malfist
That's a pretty reasonable price. Most are around $800
ocdtrekkie
There's some wild stuff included though, roll-off roof enclosures over your telescope, gigabit symmetrical fiber on a mountain. Included a couple hours a month of specialized tech support.
Like it's definitely not for an occasional hobbyist but if it's your main hobby... it sounds kinda neat.
I could imagine $600/mo. being burned on more mundane hobbies like video games.
markus_zhang
Yeah looks very expensive unless I can pay say a day.
I can also recommend starfront observatories (https://starfront.space) for folks looking to do remote hosting. It's in a remote location in Texas with solid skies and great staff, and has a pretty unique model of high density hosting to drive down cost, seeing a ton of deep sky astrophotographers come.
From time to time there are fun collaborative projects too, like https://app.astrobin.com/u/bagman?i=ey9s59#gallery.