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Cheating would be if you steal someone's equipment or data.
But if your'e paying for it, be it on a night by night basis or for the equipment outright, I don't see the difference, it's just two different ways of doing it. It's like the choice between buying a lawn mower and mowing your lawn with it, or renting a lawn mower from the petrol station and using that, why would the latter be cheating?
I haven't used rent-a-scopes yet because (1) I have a slight preferrence towards saving that money to invest in my own equipment (2) my main problem is I don't have enough time to use my equipment, so having someone else's to use instead is of no additional benefit to me. (3) I like the gadges of astronomy, so half the fun is playing with the setup.
.. but I don't have any problem with others using them.
I certainly don't think sitting on a couch using my observatory from inside is cheating, there's a lot of effort involved in setting that up, it's just the time has gone in to arranging it to work remotely rather than actually being out there. And it comes back to the gadget thing and what you're interested in about astronomy. it doesn't necessarily give you any advantage over anyone else.
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