I can also recommend starfront observatories (https://starfront.space) for folks looking to do remote hosting. It's in a remote location in Texas with solid skies and great staff, and has a pretty unique model of high density hosting to drive down cost, seeing a ton of deep sky astrophotographers come.

From time to time there are fun collaborative projects too, like https://app.astrobin.com/u/bagman?i=ey9s59#gallery.

What are other examples of managed remote hosting of things that aren’t compute? I had considered this model for a 3D print farm years ago.

This might be the smallest of marketing nitpickings, but the technical support is not free, it's complimentary for $600/month.

I've been looking to take my kids to an observatory, but the logistics makes it tricky (travel + night time), so I have been searching for online services where you can get a guided tour, with "hands-on" telescope control, but have so far come up short. It needs to be guided, since I know very little about astronomy and telescopes.

I had no idea this whole world exists and it makes me happy.

600/month

good for whomever that’s a cheap price lol, but I think if you’re a regular earning-ish person you would rather host the telescope in your own backyard

I don't understand this service. I feel it takes away from the experience. One of the few hobbies that gets you outside and under the stars and learning to navigate the sky and its motions was already being reduced to pressing a few buttons on a laptop connected to the scope. Now, you don't even leave your house?

Since it's remote and networked to begin with, is there some way to get a time-share on one of these telescopes? I don't think I'm the target audience, but I imagine that one exists.

Another telescope hosting service I heard about, based in Spain: https://www.pixelskiesastro.com/

There's some guy who built a ranch of remote operated telescopes for rent on YT pretty cool business

The backyard option is only feasible if you live somewhere without light pollution and clear skies, which is not most people.

$600/month is a reasonable deal if comparing it to driving couple of times a month to a dark sky location near you.

While it is fun and rewarding to be camping and hiking like that, the effort gets in the way of serious amateur astronomy.

Amateur astronomy is one of the few hobby science fields left where real contributions can be made and published without being a professional astronomer.

There's some wild stuff included though, roll-off roof enclosures over your telescope, gigabit symmetrical fiber on a mountain. Included a couple hours a month of specialized tech support.

Like it's definitely not for an occasional hobbyist but if it's your main hobby... it sounds kinda neat.

I could imagine $600/mo. being burned on more mundane hobbies like video games.

Most backyards don't get

     • dark skies: 21.80 Mag/ArcSec²
     • 290 clear nights each year

You can rent out viewing time on your remote telescope using services such as https://www.itelescope.net/ (you can search for telescopes hosted at SRO).

I wouldn’t expect it to be a massively profitable side hustle though.

Better skies, less light pollution, already built observatory houses to cover during the day, no space/not allowed to build in your own back yard, etc. loads of reasons to go with a hosted solution instead of building one in your own back yard.

If you've got some cheap dob with no tracking it makes sense to do it in your backyard (where the point is to look through eyepiece, not take photos), but $20 per night for everything but the actual scope at a high quality site is pretty good deal. I would expect given the other outlays to get a scope plus camera worth this site to be pretty large (e.g. at least 50k), so this is going to be a club or a school level thing, not an individual.

For comparison, pre-covid (so the cost has likely gone up quite a bit now) it was $200 a night for a 2m-class telescope and $1200 a night for a 4m-class telescope at a similar-ish site.

That's a pretty reasonable price. Most are around $800

How much remote hands time does that include per month?

I’m guessing these still need ‘manual’ tweaking at times.

Yeah looks very expensive unless I can pay say a day.