Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astronomers can’t

Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by kevin_thibedeau on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:04PM (#12252319)

$100,000 is too much to scale up without serious funding. I'd guess most of that was wasted on a scientific camera that is priced for low volume sales. Mr. McKeon captured useful images here on a ~$3000 telescope and a $230 1.2Mpix camera. A spectacular system could be put together with mostly off the shelf parts using a 4K CCD camera, alt-azimuth mount, coupling optics and filters, and data handling for $20K. Put 5 telescopes at 20 sites and you have up to 100 nightly video streams to comb through for scientific data. All for $2M. Less than what many coaches make in a year.

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by antognini on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @12:46AM (#12252668)

I don't remember what the scientific requirements were that necessitated the $100,000 lens (which isn't really scientific --- it's mostly sold to professional photographers), but given how limited funding is I'm sure that if they could have gotten away with a cheaper lens they would have. (Thinking back, the lens may have been closer to $60,000. It wasn't my project so I can't really remember.)

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by phonon on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @10:24AM (#12254666)

Each ASAS-SN telescope uses 4 commercial camera lenses, at about $10k each.

http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Product/Camera-Len...

With one detector, at about $40k.

https://telescopes.net/store/pl23042-1-bi-proline-series-e2v...

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by dr_zoidberg on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @10:59AM (#12254943)

There are cheaper lenses and CCDs which might strike a better price/performance ratio too -- I think that was the original thought behind saying "100k is too expensive!".

Of course, those items you linked are beautiful machines of precision and quality. But maybe with a cheaper system, more targets can be tracked at the same time. So a $1k lens with a $1k sensor in a $500 tracker gets you 40 "telescopes" for $100k instead of 1~2.

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by sandworm101 on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @02:35AM (#12252955)

Something permenant, with supplied utilities (power+hvac+data), secured behind locked doors, with a reasonable view of the sky, on a university campus .... you are pretty near to 100k before spending a dime on the actual hardware. And then double every number if you want it under retractable roof/cover of some sort.

One-off temporary or unofficial rigs on rooftops can be cheap. But a system of installed, standardized, telescopes on university campuses won't be build on a shoestring. If you are going to do it, get the lens that makes it worth the while.

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by ben_jones on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @12:44AM (#12252657)

Is the $100,000 just the telescope or does it include software, the expertise to setup and maintain, and all the other peripherals I imagine it'd need?

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Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr... by mirekrusin on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @12:31PM (#12255759)

Some kind of recycling programme for cameras and smartphones could lower the cost. Maybe.

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