Telescope Ranchers

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers.

Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers from around the world ship their gear to Bray Falls, who tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. We dropped by Starfront Observatories on a perfect dark sky night to see how the operation actually works.

I fisrt learned about telescope ranching late last year from astrophotographer Ian Lauer; he’s got a good video about Starfront Observatories as well:

The imagery produced by the telescopes on this ranch is impressive. Here’s one of Falls’ own images, a nebula he discovered called The Crown of Thorns Nebula.

I’ll start this off by saying this nebula should not be here! Supernova remnants are the remains of stars which detonated long ago. Nearly all supernova remnants in the sky exist within 10° of the Milky Way band, where the greatest density of stars can be seen.

This remnant lives 42° off the beaten path in VIRGO! It is a remnant that stands alone surrounded by nothing. It is the only supernova remnant in the constellation Virgo.

It is so far from where it should be, that my scientist friend Dr. Robert Fesen has doubts that it could be what we think it is, and so a professional observatory has collected data on the object and is now studying it.

• astronomy
• Bray Falls
• Ian Lauer
• photography
• science
• space
• texas
• video