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I would like to share with you my personal experiences with the i-telescope.net operation. Just to clarify - it is my personal experience and I would like to ask you for your comments on this post if you have used or are still using the same telescope network. Just to begin - it is not bad but it is not really my recommendation. Let me explain - as a provider for remote imaging for people who have to pay quite some money, I find it not appropriate that their telescopes are still operating with CDD cameras - not that they are bad, but totally outdated. The modern CMOS cameras require less exposure time and deliver much better quality of images. Yes, some 10 or 15 years ago, the FLI-PL and similar cameras were state-of-the-art cameras and very expensive, but the actual CMOS cameras from ZWO or (my preference) QHY are by far better and do not have column defects and other problems. That leads me to another question or statement - if one uses CCD cameras, to obtain signal quality compared to e.g.a QHY600, one needs more exposure time - that means, a customer needs to pay more for an image - 600 seconds is quite normal for CCD imaging and 300 at max for CMOS imaging for most targets. Maybe I am wrong, but that is also my impression. Weather - well, that is always and almost everywhere a problem - the refund option for unusable subs works perfect. You count the usable subs and deduct the number of those which cannot be used due to clouds etc and then request the percentage refund and within seconds it is on your account balance - perfect. What is a bit of a problem with probably all remote imaging operations - reliability of the systems or better down time. I can see that quite a lot of the telescopes of their system are often down -due to maintenance, repair or whatever. Not pleasant, well, but something which one has to accept. Remote operation of a complex imaging system is not an easy task and there are many, very many parts which can fail or sometimes give up. If a scheduled imaging system cannot take place, that session is automatically rescheduled - well, that is fine, but it can take up to several weeks until your session goes through... bad luck, I guess. Now to the pricing - in my opinion, the operation is quite expensive as soon as you aim for deep sky imaging with really good telescopes. Some others are reasonable, but very often booked solid or out of operation. But the price for one hour at a CDK17 is - one example - quite steep imo. And one hour is not much in imaging time for CCD cameras - I just tried it out. NGC3521 on a CDK17 with their camera FLI-PL6303 - 1h 17min with 25% moon discount 53 Dollars. That resulted in 28x120 seconds images. Just enough to get an idea of what that galaxy would look like if enough subs were taken...I guess with that equipment, I would have needed about 4-5 hours to get enough subs for a very good quality image after all processing. But that would have resulted in a bill of about 200-250 Dollar!? No way, that is far too much for me and my financial possibilities. And it would have been only one (!) target. Here comes Telescope.live - no, that is not a paid advertising for that operation, but for that amount of money, I get personalized target execution with priority etc. And for already 20 Dollars per month (only), I can download from a list of hundreds of targets. I like that operation very much and have excellent and very satisfying experiences. One more good remark about i-telescope - the support is excellent and fast in replying and competent. Question posted - answer, and yes, a competent one, received within very short time. Thanks for this. Problem solving as well - very good support. But overall, I cannot use that system anymore, to get really good results of targets, which are out of my reach at the Northern Hemisphere, I would have to spend far too much money, far too much for pleasure. I would be interested in your experiences and comments - thanks! |
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I’m imaging with iTelescope since 2013 and have the old pricing in AUD, which for Euro or Dollar based imagers is about 30% cheaper. While their OTAs and mounts are good to very good, I agree with you on their cameras; outdated by current cmos standards. They should definately upgrade… Their service is excellent as well as their refund system, very honest. At the end, I image easy to get / nice to see Southern targets, so integration time is usually below 3 or 4 hours. I stick with them at least until I don’t go South with my setup, but that is a totally different budget and story 😊 |
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Hi Georg, I think your could be missing a key point. CMOS sensors achieve better SNR with shorter subs, but that affects the individual sub, not the whole project which will require roughly the same total time all other things being equal. Put simply, with a CCD you must do 12x5min subs, with a CMOS you must do 60x1 min subs, but in the end you still need 1 hour integration time. And when you have a telescope at a pristine location with an excellent mount and whatnot (meaning light pollution and tracking errors are not a problem), 12x5 is better because it is less data to download and process. Moreover, all other things seldom are equal. The KAF-16803 has 9 micron pixels which makes it a good match for the likes of T17. You would have to bin the CMOS sensors 3x3 to be properly sampled. Consider the FLI PL 16803 sells for 3X the price of a ZWO or QHY full frame camera, there is a reason for that. That said, it is true that the cameras used in iTelescope are a little old but IMO the locations and the instruments more than make up for it. Bortle 2 vs 6 and 2" seeing vs 4" seeing, "riding" a Planewave CDK 17" with zero tracking, tilt, light leak issues are things that make a tremendous difference. 60% QE vs 80% QE is not. Personally, I used iTelescope for about 2 years and was quite happy with it. I particularly liked their support and their refund policy. But in the end I decided that I prefer using my own gear (even though it doesn't come close to what they have). Whenever I feel like processing a truly inaccessible target, I just dig into the ESO archive. Cheers, Dimitris |
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Hi Dimitris, thank you for your thoughts on this matter - but is it not a fact, that modern CMOS cameras got a higher quantum efficiency compared to the CCD cameras? And is the noise not significantly higher as well? My location - well, a bit lucky, I know - my worst Bortle is usually 4 and often close to 3 and the seeing is usually between 1.2 and 1.8". Unfortunately, the clear nights are not too often anymore compared to previous years. I am living at the border of a small village which is located at the borderline of the protected Vienna Woods area - no buildings, no lights at night (most of the time - only a few weekends in the year, there are riding competitions in the village next to my garden, then floodlights on the riding arena are on, which is very disturbing as you can imagine). And my two mounts are guiding with excellent precision - one is the EQ8R-Pro and the other one, I often do not even use my guiding scope, it is a iOprtonCEM120EC2, which I can only recommend. At the end, my primary reason for discontinuing the membership with i-telescope is the amount they charge per hour for telescopes, which are a bit larger than travelscopes. As I said - I just cannot afford to spend a couple of hundreds of Dollars/Euros for one good set of data. And yes, their support an refund policy is excellent! When you dig into the ESO archive - which I have not yet done - do you get raw data or how does it work? CS Georg |
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| If you're going to buy data why not use hubble data since it's not yours to copyright anyway. I think I'm missing the point. |
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Monty Chandler: Yes....:-) If I buy data from i-telescope or Telescope.Live - the processed image is mine because I have bought the raw data. There is no copyright on what I process, the ownership is with the raw data - therefore you need to mention that the raw data come from .....provider. Some people don´t mention it - but most do, which is correct. And those images which come from one of the "earthly" raw data provider fit nicely into my collection of astrophotographs of targets, for which I had acquired the raw data myself. Hubble sticks out - that is not what is interesting for me - they are a different world of perfection and imaging. Another possibility is - which I do sometimes - is to combine data from e.g. Telescope.Live, raw data, which I bought, with my own acquisitions. Especiallly for those targets, which I can grab myself but for, lets say, weather reasons, I was not able to finish acquistion, before that target disappears from the Northern Skies for that season. One example - I plan to acquire in total 7 hours of subs but due to bad weather, I was only able to grab 4 hours - to get a really good final image, I can use 3 hours of data from Telescope.Live (or i-telescope.net or InsightObservatory) and add those to mine and get a very good result at the end. Whenever I do this, I declare that combination to be fair - as well, when I add some artifical spikes (some do it but do not mention it). CS Georg |
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| Inappropriate content removed my moderator on 2024-03-03. |
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Adel Kildeev: Frankly speaking - your comment is rather not what I would have expected here - in my opinion, your comparison is more than inappropriate.. you should rethink your wording :-( |
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Georg N. Nyman: Hi Georg, You get raw data. It is a little tricky, getting to know the instruments and the nomenclature. And the downloads are asynchronous, you make the order and it prepares an archive. Not every image set has associate calibrations, but their "new download" facility allows you to find them if they are available. You can also go to the Hubble Legacy Archive for raw Hubble data. With both portals the problem is the sheer volume of data and the complexity of the instruments. Which is why I am referring to it as "digging". It is worth it though. The VLT is an incredible observatory, as southern and as pristine as it gets. And HST, well that needs no introductions.  |
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Georg N. Nyman:Adel Kildeev: sorry, but I stay in my opinion |
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Put simply, with a CCD you must do 12x5min subs, with a CMOS you must do 60x1 min subs, but in the end you still need 1 hour integration time. And when you have a telescope at a pristine location with an excellent mount and whatnot (meaning light pollution and tracking errors are not a problem), 12x5 is better because it is less data to download and process. *CCDs are much, much nosier than CMOS and this said for the same exposure time. Noise comes in many guises and some are exceedingly difficult to calibrate properly as they have a host of column and line defects and much higher RTN than comparable CMOS sensors, even for class 0 sensors. In terms of RON they have rather higher ones but this may be compensated by longer integration times. Given that each integration is expensive the cost for noise-free image is higher than for CMOS sensor, The main issue is that of sampling, which CMOS sensors cannot match except with binning (but at the loss of the advantage of RON). All said, I'd rather have remote services offering newer sensor and OSC ones too, which makes sense given the hourly cost and the supposed pristine skies. |
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I used iTelescope as a trial base during the ten entire moon period, which showed me that if you do it right, you can get some moonless free data. Now that the 10 period had ran it's course its now time to pay. I opt to start small with the lowest plan available. I am ready to image and find that the USA base sites are down a lot for the weather (not complaining). However, there are excellent clear nights and down for maintenance. Spain follows this pattern. Chile, by far is the most reliable location, however, Chile houses more the premium scopes at premium prices. Let's be honest here, the cost to do remote imageing is a dime in a bucket compare to packing, up the gear, driving to a dark site or flying to a dream site in another part of the world to do imageing. You get access to gear you may not own for a hobbie that's already expense and has seen an increase in price since post Covid. It would be a good thing if I could imagine with my gear and find a system similar to mine and combine the data. Running my gear and a remote system is like running a tantum system, collecting more data simultaneously. Let the software figure out how to match the output. I own a color CMOS camera, so if I can get mono from the same type and combine I'm ahead, because I didn't have to buy another piece of over price gear that in time will become obsolete. Just my two cents. |
