Moving to a Remote Hosting site - Part 1

After six years of imaging from my backyard, I have decided to move one of the rigs to a remote hosting site. At the moment that is still a bit of a journey into the unknown. In a number of blog-posts you can follow along on this journey. Part 1 describes the reasons behind the decision, the selection of the site, goals and some considerations around software and equipment.

Why remote hosting?

My backyard observatory has always been a non-permanent setup. A fixed observatory was unfortunately never an option. That means setting up the rig for a clear night and packing it up the following morning. Over the years the setup has been regularly improved. The introduction of rolling piers reduced time-to-imaging to the shortest time realistically expected. And having two setups out simultaneously, makes maximum use of available clear nights.

But it only works if you’re physically present when the sparse clear nights present themselves. And this is where it got challenging. In recent months I have been away for extensive periods of travelling and missed multiple opportunities for some nice imaging. Luckily it has been possible to bring a travel rig along. And the travel got me to some very dark skies. But while that’s a very nice experience, having two great rigs doing nothing while the skies are clear, is nagging. So the idea of remote imaging took hold. If I can do my job from anywhere in the world, as long as I have a laptop and internet connection, then why not apply the same concept to astro-imaging?

There are different ways to do remote imaging. You can build your own remote observatory ‘somewhere’ and install, maintain and service yourself. An alternative is to rent a pier in an existing observatory where the whole infrastructure is taken care of. You can even just rent imaging time on existing telescopes. As nice as the latter option is for an occasional image, my focus was on the first two options.

Goals

To decide which one would be best for me, the following goals were set out:

Within reach of ‘reasonable travel’. Reasonable means able to drive the equipment for install and easy drive or fly for maintenance visits.
Significantly darker skies than the backyard suburban Bortle 5 skies
Significantly more clear nights per year than the 20-25 effective sessions in recent years from backyard
Better seeing conditions than the current 2-3” conditions in backyard
Fully robotic imaging, with on-site support in case something goes wrong

A personally owned remote observatory, for example 0.5-1 hour drive away in a very dark place could be an option. But it would mean a significant investment in land and property, and at the end of the day still just a bit more than the 20-25 effective sessions per year experienced so far and probably not much better seeing conditions.

A hosted observatory in the south of Europe ticks a lot more of the boxes. An initial drive of 24h for installation is not ideal, but doable. And once installed, it is quite easy to travel to with many airlines having quick and easy connections. Staying within the European Union means no issues with import/export processes and costs (taxes). A quick look at the light pollution map shows that especially Spain has some extended areas with very dark skies. And weather conditions around the mediterranean are a lot better than in more northern parts of Europe, with better seeing and likely well over 150 clear nights per year. With the conditions so good, it is no surprise that Spain has many options for remote hosting. So a remote hosting option in the south of Europe seemed like the best option for my situation.

Which Remote Hosting site?

Most will have heard of some remote hosting sites. But what if you want to have an overview of all sites in the geographic region of your interest? It turns out that all sites from where images are published on Astrobin, can be found using the Search filter. Go to ‘Add Filter’ and select ‘Remote Source’. Click on the pulldown menu of the newly created filter and a full list can be seen. And this is where the work begins… It is a long list. Some names give away their location (e.g. Chilescope, New Mexico Skies, etc.). But for most it is a matter of googling and see if they are relevant to your objectives. At the end, this is a ‘long-list’ in alphabetical order that I came up with for sites in southern Europe.

Name	Website	Country
AstroAro	www.astroaro.fr	France
Astrocamp	www.astrocamp.es	Spain
e-Eye	www.e-eyes.es	Spain
IC Astronomy	www.icastronomy.com	Spain
Pixelskies	www.pixelskiesastro.com	Spain
Trevincaskies	www.trevincaskies.com	Spain

The next step was to reach out and ask for some basic information, such as availability, costs, conditions, etc. Three sites had immediate availability. Most other sites would have availability within a certain time. Sometimes because of expansions being built, or expected natural turnover. Costs was not a major differentiator. Some sites take into account the size of the telescope, some charge setup/support costs, some have pier included, etc. But for most sites monthly charges are in the range of €300-400/month.

Scanning the threads on forums, emailing sites and researching their websites made me more aware of the ins and outs of the operation of a remote hosting site. From there I made a list of some selection criteria that seemed relevant for my situation.

Design of the observatory
On-site support
Internet speeds
Overall confidence from correspondence
Feedback from other users

Design There are essentially two designs. One has individual roofs for individual telescopes, controlled by the user. The other design is a big space with multiple telescopes and one centrally controlled roof. In the latter case the height of the pier is chosen such that the roof can always close irrespective of the position of the telescope. In the first design the telescope usually has to be parked horizontally for the roof not to hit the telescope as the roof closes. Which one is best, is a personal preference. Individual control is great and allows for a lot of flexibility. But it is also riskier, or as some people say ‘if it can go wrong, it will go wrong some time’. I noticed that most of the newly built observatories are from the centrally controlled roof type. Neither designs have much visibility on the lower horizon. Depending on the observatory and the direction, horizon limits are 15º at best, but more often in the range of 20-30º. Most people won’t image below 30º anyway, but if you really want to get low, a dome remains the best option.

Support One of the major challenges of imaging at a remote site is that if something goes wrong, you can’t just walk into your garden and try to fix it. Reliability is a more important aspect than anything else. But even the most reliable systems sometimes need attention. And then it is important that you have good support, preferably on-site. And for a beginner in remote imaging, such support is even more important. All sites offer support, but not all support is created equal. At some sites staff needs to travel to the site to provide support, whereas at other sites, support staff lives on-site.

Internet speeds For a smooth control of the telescope and to get the many Gigabytes of data transferred to the home computer, a good internet connection is important. These sites are at remote locations, where regular glass fibre connections are non-existent. Some claim fibre optic connections, but there is often some point-to-point transmitter involved to get the data to the main grid. And 100 Mbit/s sounds like a pretty good speed, but if that is shared for the whole observatory, that is something to consider. Also, typically download speeds are advertised, but what you need the most is upload speeds. And typically they are lower. Starlink connections offer an interesting option for a remote observatory these days. They are fast, affordable, easy to install and quickly expandable in case bandwidth is insufficient.

Confidence It is interesting to see how the first email exchange already shows a lot of how the people at the site operate. And it is important to have a good feeling about that. After all, you’re putting a lot of expensive equipment into their hands to look after. When going from the long-list to a short-list, I wanted to speak to the sites and organised video-calls with some of them. That turned out tremendously helpful and is something I would highly recommend to anyone going on a similar journey.

Feedback Like with so many things in our hobby, the various forums are invaluable when it comes to help from peers. Through contacts within my own network, as well as various direct messages with people who either have posted about a certain site, or who have published images from that site, I was able to get very valuable feedback from actual users. But feedback is subjective and different people have different needs. So feedback information may actually be conflicting. What is a bad experience for one user, does not have to be a bad reference for you. So it is important to weigh opinions based on your own criteria.

The final selection

In the end I chose for IC Astronomy. This site is located approximately 14 km away from Oria, a village in the Provence of Almería, in the south-east of Spain. The claim is that the site has up to 250 clear nights per year. That is probably a bit optimistic, but even 150-200 clear nights per year would be a major improvement to the current situation. The site is approximately 2.5h drive from Alicante Airport. The site hosts approximately 30 telescopes, in several self-designed observatory buildings. These are of the type where the roof is centrally controlled, and telescopes don’t have to be parked before roof closure. Each building has its own weather station that ensures opening under safe conditions only. The site is setup by Colin Cooper and Ian King. Colin lives on-site and provides support. He has a full workshop available, where piers are made and telescope repairs can be conducted. Internet connectivity is provided via one Starlink satellite dish per building. We had a great introduction call. Colin was very professional, experienced and helpful. He is open to try out new things as well. A space was available, and as soon as I have the rig ready for transport, it will go to the site.

*The observatory buildings at IC Astronomy, with multiple piers and a centrally controlled roof per building.*

Location benefits

The site is located at a latitude of 37°N. There are several benefits of this more southern based latitude compared to my backyard in Groningen, The Netherlands, which is at a latitude of 53°N.

The first is seasonal effect on night-length. The more north you go, the shorter the nights are in summer and longer in winter. In my backyard, there is no astronomical darkness at all from mid May until end of July. This means that 2.5 months of the year imaging is effectively impossible. For the IC Astronomy site, even in mid summer the shortest nights still have 5.5h of astronomical darkness. And interestingly enough, in winter, the differences are not that much, with the backyard having 12h of astronomical darkness and IC Astronomy still 11.2h. So across the year, there are many more night-hours at the remote site than there are in my backyard.

The backyard in Groningen (left) experiences no astronomical night during the summer months. At the IC Astronomy site in Spain even the shortest nights are still 5.5h long. Overall there are many more night-hours at the remote hosting site. ***(source: www.timeanddate.com)***

The second benefit of the location is that it has an altitude of 1196m. Compare that with my backyard, which is technically at -1.5m. That means there is one kilometer less air between the telescope and the cosmos. This should be advantageous in getting overall better seeing conditions.

Finally, the lower latitude means that more objects on the southern hemisphere can be imaged. From my backyard any object with a Declination of less than -20° is impossible to image. From the IC Astronomy site, that number may come down to -30° or so. That equates to 17 more Messier objects to be completed.

Equipment and Software

There is a great video available where John Hayes shares his experiences with running a telescope rig at a remote hosting site in Chile. He summarises the three main success factors as: reliability, reliability and reliability. Even when there is on-site support, you want to be able to run your rig with as little as possible interruptions. This has consequences for the choice of both hardware and software.

Hardware

The rig that will move to the remote hosting site will be the one with the Planewave CDK14. This telescope was commissioned earlier this year when capturing supernova SN2023ixf. An observatory under the mediterranean sky is probably a better fit anyway than a backyard in The Netherlands. The CDK14 sits on a 10Micron GM2000 mount, a mount with absolute encoders, allowing unguided imaging. The focuser is the Optec Gemini rotating autofocuser, capable of handling loads up to 10kg. So far the easy part. The camera was a bit more of a puzzle. The CDK14 is best equipped with the ASI6200MM, a full-frame camera. But if that camera is permanently stationed at the remote site, the largest monochrome sensor available for the remaining telescopes would be the ASI533MM. That is a bit small, especially for the wide-field FSQ-106. So I decided to add a new full frame camera to accompany the CDK14 to Spain. The camera chosen for that task is the Moravian C3-61000 Pro. This camera has the same Sony IMX455 sensor as the ASI62000M, but in an ‘industrial grade’ version. According to the claims the benefits are better reliability and rated for intensive use (>300h per year). The camera comes with a mechanical shutter, allowing shooting darks without covering up the telescope.

Software

Besides reliable hardware, software too should be resilient and stable to work well remotely. The current software in use is KStars/Ekos. Generally this works reliably. But my experience is certainly not error-free. Mostly this is associated with updates though, so being cautious with upgrading might just do the trick.

As far as automation goes, this is essential for imaging remotely. At a minimum, after turning the system on and performing some necessary startup routines, the system should be able to work its way through one or two targets for the night with pre-configured sequences. But this still requires a manual setup of which targets to shoot each night, and a manual startup sequence. My ultimate goal would be to go a step further. Load the system with a set of targets, have the system automatically switch on when conditions are right, image targets from the list according to criteria around visibility, priority, etc., and close down at the end of the night. This is referred to as robotic imaging.

In KStars/Ekos, the combination of the scheduler and writing your own scripts would get you quite far. But I’m not a programmer and have no desire to learn how to write scripts. There are systems that have robotic imaging functionality built in. The oldest one and much acclaimed is ACP Expert. But ACP is only a partial solution and requires other software to do imaging, autofocusing etc. An alternative solution is Voyager. This software, known for its focus on reliability, has received an update last year that introduced the RoboTarget Manager, a tool specifically designed with the objective of robotic imaging in mind. Recently also an add-on for NINA has been created that can do something similar.

Voyager comes with another benefit though, and that is the client/server architecture. Via Web Dashboard most regular tasks can be performed from a browser at the home PC, tablet or smartphone, without screen emulation of the telescope computer. The RoboTarget Manager can also run as a client on your home PC and then offload its information to Voyager on the acquisition computer. The client/server architecture creates a user experience similar to cloud computing, ideal for monitoring a remote system.

Focus on reliability, RoboTarget Manager and client/server architecture were for me three important reasons to have chosen Voyager for the automation of my remote rig. The consequence is that I will have to learn a new piece of software, which may be a step back in the beginning. It also means I have to switch operating system, from Linux/Mac to Windows….

The Voyager Web Dashboard (left) and RoboTarget Manager (right) allow for a lot of control from the home PC without screen emulation of the acquisition computer. This provides an extra level of convenience for remote imaging.

Conclusion

After 6 years of imaging from my backyard in The Netherlands, I will move one rig to IC Astronomy, a remote hosting observatory in Oria, Spain. The major driver behind the initiative is the ability to be able to keep imaging also when not at home, as long as an internet connection is available. In the selection of the site, some of the major goals were more clear nights, darker skies with better seeing, while within relative proximity. IC Astronomy ticks all of those boxes and provides on-site support, something very important especially for a beginner in remote imaging.

In terms of control, the final objective is to be able to do ‘robotic’ imaging. This means completely autonomous start/stop and working off a database with targets, each to be imaged under pre-set conditions. Reliability is key for such a goal. Voyager seems to be designed with both these goals in mind, so this will be the platform to be used. If only it came to the Mac….

One thing that I will truly miss, is the ‘fiddling around’ with the system. The ability to physically touch the telescope, make little upgrades, do some troubleshooting, switch out components, etc. is a big part of the fun of this hobby. Therefore I am very glad to keep one rig in my backyard to do just that. While at the same time collect a lot of data, so that an attempt can be made to complete serious amounts of images of a specific catalogue or type of target. It remains to be seen how much I’m gonna miss the actual interaction with the telescope.

In the next blog-post, the journey towards remote imaging will be continued. Special attention is paid to ‘command and control’. PC, power supply, switches, relays and cabling all require thoughtful consideration. The goal is to get all of this up and running at home, get some experience with Voyager under the belt and iron out the main kinks in the setup, before I transport everything off to Spain.