Sierra remote

[Datalord]

I stumbled upon this while youtubing: https://www.sierra-remote.com/

That got my heart pumping. 237 clear nights in dark skies in a mountain. Even being in UK and having the gear in US seems to be an advantage given the time difference, so their night is our morning. I sent them a mail with a few questions about pricing and services.

Does anyone here have experiences with remote obsys like this?

[Peter Drew]

Not yet but we're working on it. 

[Peter Drew]

Just had a look through their website. Very impressive array of equipment, looks a tad crowded in parts. Hope they don't have any forest fire issues with all those wooden roll-offs.    

[Datalord]

Got a response:

"

Yes, we have clients from a number of international clients including from Thailand, Germany, Korea and Canada.

 

The cost is based on the specific telescope and mount that would be hosted at our site.  Prices start at $1,500/month.  Out prices are all-inclusive - they include the pier space, power, a Gigabit network connection, private VLAN, external VPN access, site telemetry access, internet bandwidth and on-site support.  We include two hours per month of support and ten hours of installation support.  While additional support hours are available we find that this is sufficient for most clients.

 

Our support staff can perform routine maintenance, adjustments and troubleshooting such as polar alignment, filter swaps, cleanings, re-lubricating mounts, cable and computer problems and the like.  Out staff have experience supporting a wide range of mounts, cameras, telescopes and related equipment.  We have close relationships with major vendors such a Planewave, Astro-Physics, Software Bisque, DC3 Dreams, etc.

 

If you wound like a price quote please let us know which telescope and mount you are interested in hosting.

 

Thanks for your interest in SRO!"

 

That's a bit more than i will carry on my own, but I would not be adverse to the idea of sharing a setup. With 230 clear sky nights, it's at least a 10 time increase over UK.

Just to gauge feasibility, would anyone else potentially be interested in sharing a setup? 

[Demonperformer]

That works out at about  $75 per clear night. A bit rich for my blood, but good luck with finding people who will. 

[ollypenrice]

Just shy of £13,000 a year. Gulp.

Olly

[swag72]

There's a real push towards remote sites and hosting it would seem right now..... I was contacted by someone only this morning asking if I wanted to host my kit in a new facility in Chile, then there's a few in the US that I know of that have sprung up in the last year..... seems to be a real booming market at the moment  

[MrsGnomus]

Looks very expensive compared to some of the alternatives. E-EyE starts at 315 euros plus VAT a month and DSW  is quoting 700 dollars a month for hosting.

[Demonperformer]

That is quite a difference. With tax that works out at 4575€ per year. They also state they get about 200 clear nights per year. That is approximately £20 per clear night. And Spain is closer, to be able to go and set it all up, than US.

Tempting ...

[Datalord]

Very interesting. At that price I would be tempted to just get it for myself. 

[MrsGnomus]

You might want to speak to either @gnomus (by PM) or @Barry-Wilson about E-EyE. They set up a jointly owned rig there in November last year (I was there as occasional helper/getting in the way during the setup). I’m sure that either or both of them would be happy to oblige. 

[Demonperformer]

Here's a thought that has just struck me - how do people get 'flats' at a remote location?

Some automated mechanism for adding a panel to the front of the scope at the end of the session? - I would guess not, but still, I think, a valid question.

Thanks.

[swag72]

3 minutes ago, Demonperformer said:

Here's a thought that has just struck me - how do people get 'flats' at a remote location?

Some automated mechanism for adding a panel to the front of the scope at the end of the session? - I would guess not, but still, I think, a valid question.

Thanks.

Exactly as you thought...... something like this http://www.optecinc.com/astronomy/catalog/alnitak/flipflat.htm

[Demonperformer]

Thanks, Sara. More expense and something else to go wrong!

[MrsGnomus]

If you look at the telemetry section of the DSW site you will see that there is a mix of flip flats and also larger flat panels in use.

Steve and Barry use an Alnitak flip flat at E-EyE. We have the same system in our home observatory. I believe it is supported in SGP.  They were out of production for a while but I ordered two directly from Optec last spring and they were delivered as soon as they started making them again which gave us a chance to test them out in the U.K. before one was installed at E-EyE.

The flip flat has the advantage of helping keep dust/beasties away from the front element of the scope.  While the intensity of the panel can be altered the exposure times for narrowband filters are quite long even with the panel on full brightness.

[Whirlwind]

10 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Just shy of £13,000 a year. Gulp.

Olly

It definitely is.  I thought that included them buying the equipment though which would then make more sense?  You could probably hire a Spanish cottage for 6 months for less...

[Whirlwind]

10 hours ago, swag72 said:

There's a real push towards remote sites and hosting it would seem right now..... I was contacted by someone only this morning asking if I wanted to host my kit in a new facility in Chile, then there's a few in the US that I know of that have sprung up in the last year..... seems to be a real booming market at the moment  

It probably cycles with the weather, which seems particularly bad currently

[Datalord]

2 hours ago, MrsGnomus said:

If you look at the telemetry section of the DSW site you will see that there is a mix of flip flats and also larger flat panels in use.

Steve and Barry use an Alnitak flip flat at E-EyE. We have the same system in our home observatory. I believe it is supported in SGP.  They were out of production for a while but I ordered two directly from Optec last spring and they were delivered as soon as they started making them again which gave us a chance to test them out in the U.K. before one was installed at E-EyE.

The flip flat has the advantage of helping keep dust/beasties away from the front element of the scope.  While the intensity of the panel can be altered the exposure times for narrowband filters are quite long even with the panel on full brightness.

Just looked at the flip-flats. It seems like they only go up to 8", which is a far cry away from my 11" and 12" scopes. Interesting discussion, though. If I end up going that route, I assume the people at the facility have suggestions and experience I could use.

[VNA]

Can't you rent time on some of those remote sites?

I think there are several remote sites in Arizona or New Mexico? They can be as high as the Sierra!

It is for sure not cheap to set up and maintain! 

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, Whirlwind said:

It definitely is.  I thought that included them buying the equipment though which would then make more sense?  You could probably hire a Spanish cottage for 6 months for less...

I think you could hire a Spanish cottage for two years for less.

For what it's worth - and I have strictly zero availability so this is not an advert - I charge 1000 euros per year for hosting (though the owners constructed the shed and look after their own IT side of things.)

Flats: it ought to be possible to do twilight sky flats but I just do panel flats with the owners when they want them. There is a lot of mythology surrounding flats. Firstly nothing on the objective affects them. Think secondary mirror on Newtonians. So on fixed setups they are very durable. Three months is routine, six perfectly possible. Secondly I find that one flat fits all most of the time. (ie a luminance flat will work for all filters.) If you feel that this shortcut impacts on my images please tell me! As most of you know, we do a lot of multi-panel mosaics here for which flattening is very important - but when I do the data collection 'one flat fits all.' Tom is more pernickety!  (But when I send him the data I don't always fess up...)

I had a phone call from a young guy asking if I could advise him on sites near me for setting up a big robotic operation. He also asked me if I might be interested in (paid) work doing a bit of on-site trouble shooting  'if it were needed.' I politely bowed out right from the start. Anybody who thinks trouble shooting 'might' be needed is on cloud nine. Minor tinkering, rebooting, replacing cables, re-seating 12 volt supplies, replacing UPS batteries etc etc etc is non-stop. I pop up to fix something probably five times per week. Just think about your own imaging kit. I reckon mine 'just works' till I think about it more carefully, then I think 'Oh yes, I did reboot that USB twice last night' etc etc. And how many Astro USB/power hubs have I replaced? You don't want to know, but you won't find any of them on my setups!

The enemy in the UK might be called Cloud. The enemy of robotic installations might be called Windows 10.

Olly

[Whirlwind]

11 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

I think you could hire a Spanish cottage for two years for less.

For what it's worth - and I have strictly zero availability so this is not an advert - I charge 1000 euros per year for hosting (though the owners constructed the shed and look after their own IT side of things.)

Flats: it ought to be possible to do twilight sky flats but I just do panel flats with the owners when they want them. There is a lot of mythology surrounding flats. Firstly nothing on the objective affects them. Think secondary mirror on Newtonians. So on fixed setups they are very durable. Three months is routine, six perfectly possible. Secondly I find that one flat fits all most of the time. (ie a luminance flat will work for all filters.) If you feel that this shortcut impacts on my images please tell me! As most of you know, we do a lot of multi-panel mosaics here for which flattening is very important - but when I do the data collection 'one flat fits all.' Tom is more pernickety!  (But when I send him the data I don't always fess up...)

I had a phone call from a young guy asking if I could advise him on sites near me for setting up a big robotic operation. He also asked me if I might be interested in (paid) work doing a bit of on-site trouble shooting  'if it were needed.' I politely bowed out right from the start. Anybody who thinks trouble shooting 'might' be needed is on cloud nine. Minor tinkering, rebooting, replacing cables, re-seating 12 volt supplies, replacing UPS batteries etc etc etc is non-stop. I pop up to fix something probably five times per week. Just think about your own imaging kit. I reckon mine 'just works' till I think about it more carefully, then I think 'Oh yes, I did reboot that USB twice last night' etc etc. And how many Astro USB/power hubs have I replaced? You don't want to know, but you won't find any of them on my setups!

The enemy in the UK might be called Cloud. The enemy of robotic installations might be called Windows 10.

Olly

Ouch.  I was just checking holiday cottage prices, didn't realise locally you could get even cheaper than that for rental costs.  That makes the stated cost even less palatable given it excludes equipment.  

Perhaps moving to Unix based systems would be better then?  

I'm intrigued about the issues though and their frequency.  I'm unsure how many systems on site you have but on average 'per system' how often do you think they go wrong and need some form of maintenance that you noted?  Is any of it due to taking shortcuts (where a better but more longer term investment helps).  I don't recall having much dead-time on observing nights but I do undertake proactive maintenance on cloudy nights (of which there are a lot) so that might be biasing my view.

As for flats.  Sky-flats are fine and are used by almost all professional observatories anyway.  Though I'm surprised you only take flats in one filter, because if there are differences in the different filter bands (e.g. varying amounts of dust on each filter) would that not affect the final image? The overall large scale structure should be the same because that is more due to the optics, but dust bunnies might show up?

 

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, Whirlwind said:

Ouch.  I was just checking holiday cottage prices, didn't realise locally you could get even cheaper than that for rental costs.  That makes the stated cost even less palatable given it excludes equipment.  

Perhaps moving to Unix based systems would be better then?  

I'm intrigued about the issues though and their frequency.  I'm unsure how many systems on site you have but on average 'per system' how often do you think they go wrong and need some form of maintenance that you noted?  Is any of it due to taking shortcuts (where a better but more longer term investment helps).  I don't recall having much dead-time on observing nights but I do undertake proactive maintenance on cloudy nights (of which there are a lot) so that might be biasing my view.

As for flats.  Sky-flats are fine and are used by almost all professional observatories anyway.  Though I'm surprised you only take flats in one filter, because if there are differences in the different filter bands (e.g. varying amounts of dust on each filter) would that not affect the final image? The overall large scale structure should be the same because that is more due to the optics, but dust bunnies might show up?

 

The rate of intervention goes in spurts. One outfit may work for six weeks without attention but I doubt it's much more than that. (I host five.) Then there may be a rush of issues, possibly with a common cause like a failing power supply or simply one bad connection. Today I need to go and unplug an all sky camera, for instance, since it seems to be draining its UPS due to some kind of mild short circuit. At least that's the owner's theory so we'll give it a try. Before that we had issues with one of the roof motors whose relay didn't like getting very cold. Fitting a very low output heater on its box fixed that one. And before that one of the guide cameras kept losing connection. This was probably due to a failing USB hub. There's always something, but it isn't a big deal if you have someone on hand. The trouble is, when you are hands on with your kit you won't really register the fact that you've given a USB a wiggle. But when you're remote there's no wiggling!

The dust bunnies, I find, are not from contaminants on the filters other than very exceptionally. They are usually on the chip window. Since the RGB layer nearly always requires software attention to gradients anyway, a small discrepancy in the flats tends to lie below that threshold and will be fixed by DBE or GradX or whatever. And then it will be illuminated according to the L layer anyway. One flat for all doesn't always work but it usually does - for me. Many visiting imagers use this method. I was a relative latecomer to it.

Olly

[jjosefsen]

Interresting read Olly!

I didn't know there was so much work involved, or that you run that many setups.

[Whirlwind]

3 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

The rate of intervention goes in spurts. One outfit may work for six weeks without attention but I doubt it's much more than that. (I host five.) Then there may be a rush of issues, possibly with a common cause like a failing power supply or simply one bad connection. Today I need to go and unplug an all sky camera, for instance, since it seems to be draining its UPS due to some kind of mild short circuit. At least that's the owner's theory so we'll give it a try. Before that we had issues with one of the roof motors whose relay didn't like getting very cold. Fitting a very low output heater on its box fixed that one. And before that one of the guide cameras kept losing connection. This was probably due to a failing USB hub. There's always something, but it isn't a big deal if you have someone on hand. The trouble is, when you are hands on with your kit you won't really register the fact that you've given a USB a wiggle. But when you're remote there's no wiggling!

The dust bunnies, I find, are not from contaminants on the filters other than very exceptionally. They are usually on the chip window. Since the RGB layer nearly always requires software attention to gradients anyway, a small discrepancy in the flats tends to lie below that threshold and will be fixed by DBE or GradX or whatever. And then it will be illuminated according to the L layer anyway. One flat for all doesn't always work but it usually does - for me. Many visiting imagers use this method. I was a relative latecomer to it.

Olly

Thanks, part of this then seems to be associated with multiple different set ups then which might all have their own oddities.  Do you find those that have been around the longest have the least issues stability wise as most of the bugs have been ironed out (for example heating the motor I assume is for a newer set up because once you've identified that issue it shouldn't arise again).  Fortunately I've never had a USB issue, except for once, but that was because I tripped over the cable in the dark which is definitely not an issue when remote imaging.   But I get the point.  Do you think if the base systems were standardised that would reduce some of these issues?

As for the flats my experience is the opposite, more dust bunnies on the filters than the cover slip.  Perhaps it is different cameras?  I use a QSI and the filters are pretty close and the overall unit is reasonably well sealed so the most exposed element are the filters. Perhaps that explains the difference? I can also see your point about the Luminosity, but I spend more time with narrowband because of light pollution so again am unsure whether that is a factor for doing separate flats for these types of observations? 

[ollypenrice]

36 minutes ago, Whirlwind said:

Thanks, part of this then seems to be associated with multiple different set ups then which might all have their own oddities.  Do you find those that have been around the longest have the least issues stability wise as most of the bugs have been ironed out (for example heating the motor I assume is for a newer set up because once you've identified that issue it shouldn't arise again).  Fortunately I've never had a USB issue, except for once, but that was because I tripped over the cable in the dark which is definitely not an issue when remote imaging.   But I get the point.  Do you think if the base systems were standardised that would reduce some of these issues?

As for the flats my experience is the opposite, more dust bunnies on the filters than the cover slip.  Perhaps it is different cameras?  I use a QSI and the filters are pretty close and the overall unit is reasonably well sealed so the most exposed element are the filters. Perhaps that explains the difference? I can also see your point about the Luminosity, but I spend more time with narrowband because of light pollution so again am unsure whether that is a factor for doing separate flats for these types of observations? 

I don't think that, after initial de-bugging, there is much to choose between more recent and older setups in terms of reliability.

Having everything the same would make my life easier and many hosting setups insist on it. What I would really like would be for everyone to label all their cables! They are all tidy cable freaks (unlike me...) so cables go into snakes at one end and emerge anonymously at the other! 

For NB imaging I would indeed do flats per filter without question.

Olly