Schulman Telescope
PROS: Good location; full control of parameters; professional observatory CONS: Making a reservation is cumbersome
The Schulman Telescope is hosted by the University of Arizona in the US and is located on nearby Mount Lemmon at an elevation of 2,800m. The location provides you with a dark sky, good seeing and good weather. Between September and June, 70 per cent of the nights should be clear, something you can check via its website.
The telescope has an aperture of 31.5m and a remarkable focal length of almost 6m. As with iTelescope and Lightbuckets you are given full control over each telescope, allowing you to adjust all of the parameters yourself.
Although the interface for controlling the telescope is quite detailed, booking observing time is cumbersome, as no web portal exists for this purpose. Booking enquires have to be made via email or telephone and there is no calendar to show the free slots available. This makes booking via email in particular quite laborious, in spite of the responsive customer service.
There are two operating modes, real-time or scheduled observation. The former allows you to quickly influence your observation by adjusting parameters on the fly, whereas the latter is quite convenient if you have less time. Simply schedule your observation plan and it will be queued and executed automatically as soon as possible. There’s no need for you to be in front of your computer. KEY INFO http://skycenter.arizona.edu/programs/ remote_observing/real_time LOCATION: Mount Lemmon, Arizona EQUIPMENT: One telescope; 31.5-inch reflector with 5,695mm focal length PRICE: $200/hour