Telescope Farms

Image credit: CBS News

Light pollution is washing out the night sky. A remote telescope farm helps stargazers bring the cosmos to their screens.

By day, a row of plain-looking sheds in sleepy Rockwood, Texas, looks like nothing more than a place to store farm tools and feed. But when the sun dips below the horizon, their roofs peel back in unison to reveal a hidden network of hundreds of telescopes.

The so-called telescope farm is the brainchild of amateur astronomer Bray Falls, who turned his passion into a business when he co-founded the company Starfront Observatories 18 months ago.

“It has not gotten old yet. It’s so cool, every single time,” Falls said of the transforming sheds.

Starfront rents space to customers who ship their telescopes to the farm and control them via the internet from the comfort of their homes. The remote location allows amateur stargazers to take stunning pictures they wouldn’t be able to from home, because the sky in Rockwood is much darker than where they live — helping solve one of amateur astronomers’ biggest problems: light pollution.

The night sky has gotten harder to see due to a 10% yearly increase in light pollution over the past decade, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Science.

(Source: CBS News)