The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System (schmidtsciences.org)

The age of plausibly buying a legacy is gone, so these vanity projects inspire more cynicism than anything else.

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The broader availability of data from astronomical observations starts to become relevant in the present time of coding agents that can help hobbyists.

Interesting. Wayne Rosing (Silicon Valley pioneer and early engineering lead at Google) has been working on a global telescope project for a long time now also.

https://lco.global/

As you can see by the name of the thing, they are married

Lots of weird marketing speak on here for an astronomical observatory. “Modular design that leverages economies of scale” what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Best of luck to them anyway.

Edit: it looks like the Argus array at least is a project out of Chapel Hill. Better info here: https://argus.unc.edu/specifications

Schmidt probably helping fund it.

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The level of negativity in these comments is surprising. We can certainly debate whether billionaires should exist at all, but given that they do, here’s one who’s putting his money towards advancing cutting edge science instead of buying a third mega yacht. I am strongly in favor.