Has anyone tried iTelescope?

[Michael-H]

You can sign up for remote imaging using one of some 30 telescopes at four real dark sky sites. Has anyone tried it? Is there a lot of setup required?

Michael

[GreatAttractor]

Michael,

A few guys here in Poland will be buying access to a telescope in Spain (Nerpio), they have some info at http://iteleskop.org.

You can ask for details by writing to ptma@ptma.szczecin.pl.

[Michael-H]

I was looking at http://itelescope.net, but it seems to be the same location as their Spanish site.

[jkwhinfrey]

There's not much setup Michael. Just some details and your credit card ;-)

Unfortunately they don't seem to have their trial accounts anymore. These used to be available for a fixed fee - paid in $Aus via credit card.

You now need to commit to $19.95 a month for access to the telescopes, this is the account I have. I think this might be because the scopes have become much busier. Some are difficult to book time on. You can cancel anytime, I think, but remember to use your remaining credits up first.

I've been using it on and off for about a year, and had reasonable results with DSOs and variable star photometry. But I'm no imager, so opinions may vary. My experience is quite limited... I'm a dedicated visual observer it seems :/

They say that you only pay for the time you're actually capturing photons, and that's quite true. The cost soon builds up though, so 6 hours of narrowband subs are going to be very expensive!

They're also very good about refunds when the tracking fails or there's some other problem.

Hope that helps,

James

[Gazabone]

It might be worth considering Slooh, I've had some nice images from that and you have a choice of Canaries and Chile although only 4 scopes. However, it's a fixed charge of (from memory) $24.95 per month but that's how much you regardless of how much you use it.

[ronin]

Someone else asked similar a couple of weeks back, wish I could recall what I posted. Although I think the above has covered most common options. There is also the Bradford Telescope also, based in the Canaries I believe.

I am half sure I read of a US based scope that was offering imaging, it was not a sort of set up of small scopes (as iTelescopes etc) but for some reason i think it was one of the bigger ones, that occasionally gets named. One of the "historic" scopes I think. It was something I read about 6 or 8 months back and I sort of saw it, thought something like "they have entered that area as well now", then hopped off to another page and didn't anything sensible like book mark the reference.

Stick "remote imaging scopes" into google and a number of possible options are presented.

[Michael-H]

Thanks!