> But with limited telescope time available, their views of the planets only come in snatches.
It seems silly that university astronomy departments don't invest in small arrays of these telescopes with automated tracking software deciding where to point each night. With a modest number of sites you could have global coverage of all nearby objects of interest regardless of foul weather in some spots.
But you know, they need more money to expand administration instead.
Each of the telescopes is an off-the-shelf commercial telephoto lens hooked up to a CCD, for a total cost of ~$100,000 per telescope. I'm a little fuzzy on the details now, but I think they have something like four cameras on a single mount, and sites in Hawaii and Chile with plans to put another mount in South Africa (or maybe Australia?). The eventual goal will be to have continuous coverage of the sky, and new images of any given patch of the sky every ~3 days or so.
They made a bit of press a while back for discovering the most luminous supernova ever, ASASSN-15lh:
$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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
That is basically what we have built at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (lcogt.net). We have ~20 telescopes around the globe, all on a single network that essentially distributes a queue of observations to where and when they are most likely to be observed. The result is 24/7 coverage of the both the northern and southern hemispheres.
It's a lot harder than you'd think. There is no such thing as an off the shelf professional grade telescope, so we employ a large engineering team to actually build them. Scopes and their instruments are complex and made of many independent systems and require a TON of software to run without an human operator (and even with). Scheduling observations is another challenge, an np-complete one actually. Then there's the problem of analyzing and storing gigabytes of data a day.
As a member of the relatively small software team, we have a TON to do. But it's a really cool problem to work on!
Hey, that looks amazing! I was wondering about the software/hardware controlling the telescopes themselves, but cannot find any information on it on the website, is there any link, or that's more "behind the scenes"/non-public info?
The software controlling the telescopes is a collection of java agents using JADE: http://jade.tilab.com/
There are many agents with different responsibilities,from driving the cameras themselves, to the mount, dome, autoguiders, etc. We use a pubsub based model to keep them all in the know.
I worked at the Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics at $respected_university for about 10 years, and I think your comments aren't super accurate as a description of a solution to their problems and I don't think the ending snark is accurate or necessary.
Go look at any major astro department, and you'll see there's not a lot of fat to be trimmed. I was "administration" as you probably consider it, but they do actually need sysadmins to keep things running so everyone else can focus on the science. I can assure you there weren't enough of us. There weren't any asst. deans of pencil sharpening or whatever sucking up the department's valuable funds.
To your earlier point, if they thought they were useful, I'm sure someone would have bought such an array. In fact, two of the above commenters mentioned such a project. The thing to keep in mind is that these things aren't free. You need engineers to put them together, professors to write the grants, software engineers and grad students to write the software, trips to go set them up, grad students to do the analysis, etc. Those all cost money.
None of the professors at my university (and most other universities with which we interacted) were interested in the subjects described in the articles as good candidates for amateur telescopes though, so it's kind of irrelevant. Whether that's where their interests truly lay or whether that's where the grant money is, I couldn't say. At any rate, all the visual spectrum experimentalists in the department needed big telescopes in clear places for long exposures to study their chosen subjects.
Additionally, at least in my department, the visual spectrum experimentalists were a distinct minority, maybe about 10% of the faculty. The rest were theoreticians (50% or so), microwave astronomers, radio astronomers, x-ray astronomers, etc. My university has been historically theory-heavy so that may be different elsewhere.
Would the experimentalists have liked more time on Keck, Hubble, Chandra, VLA, etc.? I'm certain they would have, but a few dozen backyard 30cm telescopes aren't going to get the job done.
There need to be people to actually look at all the footage. More telescopes is not really enough. And there is significant effort involved in amateur astronomy. It takes a long time to learn all the tricks to pull the data from the photos and videos, and lots of time to edit each photograph and video using the software tools available.
Besides that, there are rather a lot of objects of interest. The Herschel catalogue contains 400 objects. The NGC catalogue contains thousands. Then there's comets, asteroids, planets, the sun.
Universities really aren't well enough funded for the kind of investment that would be needed to cover everything. Given that they are already spending millions on big telescopes, that's quite clear.
It's not quite as easy as you might think, but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-STARRS. The data analysis is quite a challenge, though. According to that site, the data rate from the PS1 telescope is ~ 10TB/night.
Hubble is nearing its end of life. I always hoped that robotics would have advanced enough to replace aging parts before it re-entered the earth's atmosphere. Webb and Hubble could both be fully utilized.
Hubble still has 5 years of use planned, and won't decay before 2030. Plenty of time to get the infrastructure in place for a servicing mission by an Orion capsule or even a robotic mission.
It seems silly that university astronomy departments don't invest in small arrays of these telescopes with automated tracking software deciding where to point each night. With a modest number of sites you could have global coverage of all nearby objects of interest regardless of foul weather in some spots.
But you know, they need more money to expand administration instead.