A Starfront Observatories co-founder explains how astronomers ship telescopes to their dark-sky facility in Texas, where staff install them in dedicated buildings. Users control the instruments remotely from anywhere to observe and photograph stars. All telescopes park pointing north at Polaris, aligned to Earth's rotation so they share one reference point.
'Cause all of these have to be aligned, like, with the Earth's rotation, so everyone is gonna be at the exact same spot.
I try not to anthropomorphize things too much. There's something funny about them all sitting here waiting to do something.
I am one of the co-founders of Starfront Observatories, and what this place is is a remote observatory. It's in the middle of nowhere. There's no city lights. People from all around the world send their telescopes here to observe the night sky from this place with no light pollution. We set them up and they can all access their stuff through a computer remotely and then use their telescope to actually do observations or take photos. All right, this is the inside of building number 2.
What we have here is a very, very weird way to make a living. People send Bray their telescopes and he houses them in these buildings.
And they're all just like starting out pointing this way. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. This is the standard park position for all the mounts, and they're all pointed north at Polaris. Polaris, or the North Celestial Pole.
