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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...

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.