Telescope Farm

From the attached article in the New York Times (q.v.), it seems that many amateur astronomers these days have highly automated telescopes. They dial all the night's settings into the computer, then sit snugly indoors while the digital images roll in.

Now, it must be very frustrating to someone who has spent all that money and is all set up to watch the transit of Mercury or the Crab Nebula when it turns out to be rainy that night.

So, on the model of the server farms that many of us rely on already, I propose telescope farms. We take some space in the remote areas where full-sized scientific telescopes are set up, and set up an array of mid-sized computer-controlled telescopes.

Subscribers can then control a telescope for as long as they've paid for, and get the images back by email or CD. And with a telescope farm, if the subscriber's particular telescope is offline that night for any reason, the subscriber would be switched to an adjacent telescope without even knowing it.

And with a bunch of telescope farms in different locales, we can even adjust for the vagaries of weather, automatically switching subscribers to where the weather is clear. (They might need to adjust their viewing list, depending on geographic location, of course, but then again, a London subscriber could use this feature to watch the southern stars).

I see this as particularly useful to hobbyists living in generally overcast places, or in big cities with light-polluted skies and limited outdoor space. But we could also let inner city schools use the equipment, and get deprived kids involved in real research projects of the type described in the article.