Global Rent-a-Scope

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Telescope Hosting

Host your own telescope in Australia for as little as
$4.20 USD* per imaging hour!

GRAS has opened a new hosting facility located in the outback desert of South Australia. This site provides proven unprecedented level of conditions conducive to great imaging. This is one of the same locations from where GRAS hosts its own telescopes in Australia.

The folks at Global Rent-a-Scope, being one of the most experienced in this field, are highly qualified to host your telescope. GRAS currently opeates over 10 remote telescope systems around the global. We have over 7 years of experience!

We have some of the best staff on the books with high levels of experience in telescope optics, remote robotic telescope system design, computing, application design and development, TCP/IP internet networking. We also have extensive experience with a large range of astronomy application and automation. Overall this places us in the perfect position to host your own private system.

SITE PERFORMANCE

Let's address what might be the first concern that comes to mind; site performance!

While we can present you with all the climate data and clear sky daytime data from the Australian Bureau of Metrology the fact remains that all of the statistical data has little to do with the real performance of the site. These systems that gather the published data don't track clouds at night or other limiting conditions like the wind velocities.

In the past 6 months of operation our site has on average:

22.3 days of clear usable nights per month
10.1 concurrent clear usable nights in a row per month
206 hours of usable imaging time per month

View the detail here!

Generally south of Australia has an endless waves of cold fronts with northern Australia bombarded with tropical weather patterns year round. Our site is located between these Sothern and Northern Australian weather patterns placing us in an a better position of realative stability.

Also we are located in an arid desert climate which general means days are hot with the night being very cold (except for in the middle of summer where temperate at night can hover around 28C / 80F due to extended heat waves.

Seeing normally ranges from 1.5" to 2.8" FWHM with best being around 1" FWHM with the maximum being around 4.5 FWHM.

Moorook is located about 30 miles away from the next closest township. This provides near perfect darkness, with no moon in the sky even with dark eye adaption you have trouble seeing the ground. The southern Milky Way budges from east-west across half of the sky and most Messier objects are easily visible with the naked eye; the limiting factor is your eyesight!

THE SITE ITSELF

The site is located on 40 acres property need the rural township of Moorook in South Australia. The property is owned by avid astronomer Darren Wallace along with his family which includes 3 Bull Terriers. Since Darren lives on his property its places him in the ideal position to provide local ground support.

Darren is well versed in the operations of Paramounts , Takahashi, RCOS, Computing and networking and the general operation of complex remote telescope operations. Additional support is provided by Brad Moore of Global Rent-a-Scope, typically most complex support issues can be handled remotely and if not Brad is only a short flight away from Moorook.

The site is a secured private property all the observatories are under lock and key with the extra benefit of 3 guard dogs roaming the premises.

OBSERVATORY FACILITIES

We offer a range of observatory facilities including the following features:

Piers: These are custom built to fit your telescope into the observatory to ensure the roof or dome can be closed in any telescope position.

We restrict the use of concrete or brick in the observatory to minimise the pads acting like heat sinks. This, in turn, reduces heat thermals coming from the building,. The fully wooden floors along with the rest of the structure constructed of mostly wood provides super fast cool down times. This practise greatly enhances local seeing conditions .

A 1.5ft square concrete footing is poured into the ground and the pier footing for each system.

Personal Remote Observatory

We can provide you with your own observer which includes a single pier located in either a Technical Innovations Home Dome (2 x available now) or your own personal roll off roof observatory (available now).

Orginal Proof Of Concept Design - Under Construction

Both options are fully automated and are controlled by you. You can choose to open and close your remote observatory when you want or choose fully automatic. The control system will prevent you from opening as well as automatically closing your system when weather conditions are questionable.

Under Construction - Door to be fitted

The roll off roof facility will generally house up to a 16 inch telescope with a horizon limit of around 30 degrees however we can build to specification for larger telescopes.

All observatories are fully sealed to minimize dust and dirt.

Under Construction - Cladding Fitted

Shared Remote Observatory

At the moment we offer shared observatory facilities which are located in dual pier roll off roofs (available now). The observatory will automaticity open and close subject to current weather conditions. Piers are custom built to fit your telescope into the observatory to ensure the roof can be closed in any telescope position (available now).

Telescope Clearance

INTERNET CONNECTIVITY

Our site Internet connectivity is delivered by broadband Microwave technology. Bandwidth at the moment is 1 Mbps bidirectional feed which is scaled to meet our data load demands.

We are implementing a short-term strategy to install a second Internet connection at 2 Mbps dedicated to handle the transfer of images independently. The remaining 1 Mbps link will then be dedicated to provide a high level of control for remote operations of your observatory.

As usual GRAS is looking out for your best interests and continues to puts you in control!

At no additional cost to you, GRAS also will provide for the transfer of your files; automatically in real time, to our high-speed ftp server for download. at your convenience. The main benefit of this service is your files are automatically waiting for your collection on our hi-speed FTP server. There is no extra charge for this high-speed FTP service.

SITE POWER

The site is connected to Australian Main power grid and in main feed 240 volts AC at 50 Hz. We have only experienced one power outage in 6 months of operation that lasted for 8 hours. Please check your power supplies to ensure they are rated for Australian power conditions, otherwise a step-down transformer can be supplied to supply 110 volts AC.