Quote:
Originally Posted by tino
This sounds great as a Freebee but what are the actual costs as a proper customer?
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Let me preface this with I work for and I'm a co-owner of Global Rent-a-Scope.
Let me draw breath as this a complex question to answer..
The correct answer to this is a minute tiny small faction of the cost of buying one of these system little alone 11 systems outright.
It wasn't my intention to "drum up" business for gras here. However I will answer your question since you raised it.
You can trial the full system for $50 USD and carry your G13 points across. This would give you around on average 3 hours of use on the lowest cost system and around 1.6 hours on the most expensive system. However the trial only applies once per customer account. So from $16 to $31 per hour.
GRAS offers two types of plans which optimise's cost towards CCD imaging telescopes and the science research telescopes depending on what work you want to do.
Astrophotography Plans come in a monthly subscription or once off purchase of points.
To give you a idea $99 USD per month subscription will get you around 1.8h to 1h of telescope time depending on the system. $55 to $99 per hour.
A $249 USD monthly plan will give you around 7 to 4 hours between on the system. $35 to $62 per hour.
Bulk once off purchase of $500 USD will give you around 5 to 10 hour depending on the system so from $50 to $100 per hour
You can get more hours imaging during a lunar period you can get a extra 24% discount which extends your imaging time future.
If you want to do something crazy like plonk down $5,000 USD it would get you around 156 to 86 hours depending on the system which works out to be $36 to $58 per hour not factoring in any moon discount and you get access to 11 telescope system at 3 different dark sky locations around the world.
If you think about it for a single semi-pro imaging rig around $70k to $80k on average which is about 6% of hardware costs of one system not factoring in the ongoing maintenance, internet costs and hosting costs at a good dark clear weather site.
However the downside of remote imaging is it can't satisfy the burning desire of playing with the hardware in the flesh and spending endless hours setting things up and getting really cold and tired.
Now... If you really think about it...
Lets say you spend $5000 to $12000 on a entry level imaging rig because your interested in astrophotography.
Based on my typical experience (because I've been their done it myself) give the limited opportunity in not having a dedicated setup means you need to have a dark site, have good weather, setup the telescope polar align it, setup the ccd and start taking exposures (assuming you have the experience to pull this offer in hour or so) and you might be only able to do this every once and a while due to your life commitments this also assumes you don't get frustrated with it and don't give up on astrophotography, lets face it can be very technically challenge.
You might find in the course of 3 years you might only take 10 maybe 25 hours of exposures and if your really good maybe 50 to 100 hours of total exposure time. So the true cost for buying your own system would range from $240 to $120 per hour of exposure time if you stick with it. To get the costs to $30 per hour you need to 166 hours on a $5,000 setup and 400 hours on a $12,000 setup.
If you go with a semi-pro system and spend say $60,000 on it you would need to imaging 2000 hours of total time to get the hourly cost down to $30 per hour.
In Melbourne I found I was only able to produce around 200 imaging hours per year due to weather with my semi-pro setup so the the yearly cost for me was around $300 USD per hour. This is why my system is now part of GRAS and located at a remotely hosted dark site.
Food for thought.....
Once you put it into perspective its typically much more cheaper to rent than its to own your own entry level imaging rig outright. However pure cost is not always the deciding factor otherwise everyone would rent unless your a Gender, Croman, Glesson or a Crawford pumping out images like their is no tomorrow.
Best Regards
Brad Moore