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Hello fellow iTelescope users:

Without, as far as I can tell, any prior notification to its customers, iTelescope has abruptly decided to move all of the telescopes that were hosted at New Mexico Skies to a new location in Utah. I am not going to sugar coat it, even though I should probably do so. As a long-time iTelescope customer, I am very unhappy with their lack of transparency. This is not how I would choose to do business. We deserved to be informed about this before the telescopes were abruptly taken off line, much less still being in the dark weeks later.

I don't expect these telescopes to be back online for a very long time, but when they do come back, I'll recalibrate them as necessary. The level of support provided by New Mexico Skies for these older, tricky to maintain, systems has been consistently very good. All we can do is hope that the new site can provide the same level of support. 

Yes, I know I have been dragging my feet with some of the new telescopes in Chile. I need to take images and do some work to get them set up correctly. To be honest, I was so frustrated with how poorly these telescopes worked late last spring, as well as the lack of connectivity, that I gave up on them. But I am told that I should try again, and I will stop stalling and get new calibrations out soon.

iTelescope recently provided some additional information about moving the telescopes on their Discord. Here is what was posted:

Quote:"The telescopes formally located at NMS have been fully serviced, cleaned, assembled, setup and calibrated by Blake Estes - an iTelescope employee. iTelescope flew Blake from Australia to the USA to perform these works with assistance from NMW and UDRO personal and to ensure the work was performed to iTelescope's standards. Unfortunately, these scheduled works coincided with the occurrence of C/2022 E3.

We are currently performing flats and quality assurance checks. After this is complete, we will open the telescopes for public use. Weather permitting, we are estimating that telescopes will start to become online for public use in the next 2-3 days."

Yes, I noticed this too. No warning or explanation given on the iTelescope website, that I could see. Unfortunately T18 in Spain hasn't been available to observe C/2022 E3 either because the roof's been closed despite the apparently good weather. My observing plan didn't run this morning  .

Recently, I've been able to connect to the scopes in Chile, FWIW. 

Poor way to run a railroad IMHO.

Phil S.

Hopefully it will all work out, but what worries me now is that all of the work they have described--the cleaning and upgrades, installation, mount alignment, should properly take a few months for so many telescopes. As you know, they have a tendency to throw systems online well before they are ready to be used. My guess is that everything is going to be a mess with these telescopes for weeks or even months. They will say to just get a refund, but what about all the prep time lost?

They're accepting money each month to use these unavailable scopes. They currently have 2 working scopes in the northern hemisphere, T18 & T24, a 12.5" & 24", respectively. Plus the roof on T18 hasn't opened in several days, despite good weather. I forgot about that other 135 mm camera lens based system in Spain.

Phil S.

Well, Phil, you aren't wrong.

Greg, even a blind squirrel finds a nut now & then.

The other scope in Spain is T80, which isn't listed in ST4i anyway. It's booked solid for the next few days.

Phil S.

I thought I had T80 uploaded to the web site? If not its an oversight, and I'll do that now.

I did a quick check of my T80 setup and uploaded it. These camera + lens systems are problematic to model, but it does appear to reproduce the images I have fairly well.

I just opened ST4i (4.0j R21) & the new T80 info didn't get downloaded. I also tried to update the iTelescopes manually, but there's still no T80 in the list of scopes. T70 & T71 are the last 2 that I have. 

Apparently Nerpio, Spain has suffered a power failure & is offline.

Phil S.