On the 3rd of November, 2007, we were contacted by the managers of the SkyLive project in Italy, Mr. Ivan Bellia and Mr. Giovanni Verga. They asked us if we would be interested in being part of a remote internet telescope system that was involved with the Italian Astronomical Union. We already had a remote internet telescope in place for the past 3 years for Wheaton College in the USA, called the Wheaton Telescope but this was for the exclusive use of Wheaton students only. Since we closed down public tours in September 2007, we now had available telescopes that could be used for such dedicated roles. However, we had previously had a number of different organisations contact us with such offers but these were commercial interests and not a path that we wished to follow. As a result of a rather (short) negative experience in early 2007 - we wanted to ensure that our non-profit status was kept and that any other organisation we worked with in the future, would have the same goals as Grove Creek - basically, providing access to our wonderful universe to the general public, at no profit as a public service. SkyLive shared our goals and ideals and we decided to go ahead. SkyLive was granted exclusive European use of the Grove Creek Observatory.

A new Internet Connection for Grove Creek:

There was one major problem stopping any further growth with our remote telescopes - our broadband connection. In such a remote location, the only available broadband solution available to Grove Creek was 2-Way Broadband Satellite. No ADSL is available. Our current satellite connection was already running our existing remote telescope project, the Wheaton Telescope and would not allow us to expand further. Running at only 256/128kbps with significant latency ("lag"), was already testing our patience! Something needed to be done...

Fortunately, we were able to secure a sponsor discount arrangement with Bluemaxx Internet who provides next generation satellite low latency technology and were able to boost our speed to 1024/1024kbps (1 mbit), giving us the ability to expand and add additional remote telescopes. That is well over TEN times the speed we previously had with the old connection. The new satellite broadband connection was installed on the 2nd of January. Special thanks goes to Russell Smith from Bluemaxx, that worked very hard to get the new connection working for us, at the same price we were paying for the previous much slower satellite service. Unfortunately, our upload speed has had to be reduced to 512Kbps due to dropouts - we are hoping to upgrade the hardware in the future, to a more powerful transmitter and larger dish to support 1Mbit upload again.

   
Above: Our 2-Way 2mbit Internet Satellite Dish and Modem.
Sponsored by Bluemaxx Internet via IPStar.

The "Western Observatory" at Grove Creek (housing Telescope 5)

The roof opens from the middle, with 2 motors on the southern side, remote controlling each half of the roof.
This building is located 30 meters west of the main domed observatory, measuring 5.6 meters x 4.6 meters.
"Telescope 5", (a hardware modified 12" Meade Classic LX-200), is installed on the central pier inside this building.

Steven Williams (Managing Astronomer of Grove Creek) set-up a test system on the central pier of the western observatory, using a spare Meade 12" LX-200 that had been packed away. This telescope had suffered constant blown motherboards and GOTO motors and was left over from the Wheaton Telescope Project. With permission from Professor Tim Barker from Wheaton College, the old telescope was totally upgraded with a new motherboard and GOTO motors. Previously, this model of telescope's tracking could not be turned off, without losing its known position in the sky. These extensive upgrades solved those issues and we are very grateful to Prof. Barker, for the use of the instrument. Many thanks also to Andrew Mattingly, who was kind enough to donate counterweights, that balanced the telescope perfectly as well as allowing us to use the 2nd output of the Kendrick Dew system, installed on the Wheaton Telescope, for the dew heater of the 12".

The 12" LX-200 (installed with an Optec 5X MaxField focal reducer) can now take unguided exposures of the Southern Sky up to 4 minutes (south of -25° declination) without any star trailing! Normally unheard of, for a LX-200. Many nights were spent to polar align the LX-200 exactly, as the telescope control software uses no "error mapping" software and with such a well aligned system, now no longer requires any. Other enhancements were made to the telescope, like an addition of a 18VDC trickle charged battery system to keep the telescope "alive" (the newer model LX-200s use 12VDC) and the installation of a web camera and small LED red light, shining on the declination setting circle, to assist with syncing the telescope on a known position of the night sky, pictured below:

Modification showing a web camera on a binocular
 tripod mount, screwed into the declination arm.
(Allows staff to use the internet to check the setting circle)

Tiny & faint Polarissima Australis, taken at Grove Creek
NGC2573 - the most southern NGC object at -89° 20'
Our telescope is set-up in such a way, that we can image right at the pole

This new test system then went online in Italy and took its "first light" image on the 18th of November, 2007. The SkyLive software points the telescope and operates the CCD cameras on the telescope computer side at Grove Creek, which then communicates (using highly compressed data) via our two-way internet satellite service to the server in Italy. Users then logon to the server, via the use of an interactive software package that they download for free. All the software on both the telescope and server sides were written by SkyLive and do not use any commercial astronomical packages! Anyone can watch the live CCD images as they come down - a yearly club membership fee, to help cover costs, is only charged for users that wish to actually control the telescope and take images themselves. You can even chat to other users and discuss the images being taken, as each telescope its own live chat box! Now that is cool :-)

Click here to see the images taken with "Telescope 5" and the ST8 

Another telescope for SkyLive:
 
The "Middle Observatory" at Grove Creek - 7.08m long x 4.65m wide x 2.4m high

Jim Lynch, Director of Grove Creek, kindly paid for the completion and motorisation of the middle building at Grove Creek. In exchange for Grove Creek providing free access to a new telescope, SkyLive was willing to donate a high quality mount to Grove Creek, to enable our other telescopes to be remotely internet controlled. After our initial decision became problematic, in that we would have to pay a large annual fee for the use of the mount outside of Grove Creek, we decided to purchase a Astro-Physics 1200-GTO German Equatorial mount. The new mount arrived on the 27th of December. Initially, we decided to use the new mount with Steven's Pentax 100 SDUF for very wide field work, installed in the middle observatory. Ivan sent out his SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera and CFW-8a 5 position filter wheel, that has small pixels to compliment such a high quality wide field instrument.

On May 20th, we decided to change this to use Grove Creek's massive C14 (the 2nd one every built by Celestron), which was removed from the main dome and installed on this mount. The ST-10 was then moved to the 12" LX-200 for photometric studies and the ST-8 installed on the C14. The periodical error of the 1200-GTO has a very low 1.4^sec peak-to-peak and this enables unguided exposures up to 3 minutes. However, the SkyLive software enables automatic guiding of this mount and this option be checked whenever possible.

Putting the new Astro-Physics 1200-GTO Mount together...