I was four years old when I pressed my eye to the eyepiece of a 14-inch telescope at the Carr Astronomical Observatory in Collingwood, Ontario. Saturn came into view with its rings perfectly inclined against the blackness of space. I drew what I saw and wrote about it in my best handwriting. That observation was published in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Scope Magazine in 2014.

Eleven years later, I operate a research-grade remote observatory on a mountain in southern Spain — 7,000 kilometres from my bedroom in Toronto. It has its own International Astronomical Union (IAU) Minor Planet Center code R60. Every asteroid position I submit from it enters the global database of minor planets.

This is my story of how I built it: the engineering, fundraising, logistics, and problem-solving that made it real, and the science it enables.

Left: my first time looking through a 14-inch telescope at age four. Right: the Saturn drawing I made that night, later published in RASC's *Scope Magazine.*

Why I Needed My Own Telescope

Since 2021, all my observational research had been done on borrowed time. I wrote proposals for the Faulkes Telescope Project (FTP), the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). I coordinated with citizen scientists across four continents. I accumulated over 55 hours of observation on the Didymos binary asteroid system that contributed to a peer-reviewed paper in The Planetary Science Journal.

But borrowed telescope time comes with a limitation: you don't fully control it. Sessions are blocked in fixed windows. Targets are shared. And some of the hardest observations in my research — exoplanet transits — demand up to six continuous hours at a precise time, on a specific night, regardless of what else is scheduled. Similarly, windows to study binary asteroids when they are bright enough to be observed are limited to a few days.

I faced a choice: adapt my research questions to telescope availability, or build infrastructure that would let me pursue the questions that actually mattered.

I chose infrastructure. And since Toronto sits at Bortle class 9, the worst possible sky brightness, a backyard telescope was not an option. The observatory had to be remote, at a dark-sky site, and it had to be something I could build and operate as a high school student.

From Concept to Research Plan

Dreams are free and a moment's work. Putting them into practice requires enthusiasm, time, willingness to learn new things, fundraising, troubleshooting, not getting disheartened when things go outside of the plan, persistence, and some luck too.

Building a remote observatory at fifteen required more than enthusiasm. I knew it would take a long time and involve a steep learning curve on everything from planning and fundraising to finding a suitable site, procuring equipment, integrating it, testing it, and keeping it operational. It was part of my Misogi approach to science projects: doing one genuinely challenging thing each year to stay focused and driven, while managing my everyday responsibilities as a student. It seemed this would be the "Year of Remote Observatory" for me.

I began by drafting a research framework outlining the scientific goals the observatory would serve, then translated those goals into hard performance requirements that every aspect of the build — from location to power backups — would be evaluated against.

Defining the Engineering Requirements

Before selecting any equipment, I wrote out the non-negotiable performance requirements. The most demanding target was millimagnitude photometry: the ability to detect brightness changes in stars as small as 0.001 magnitudes, or one-tenth of one percent. That precision is required to measure exoplanet transit depths and model asteroid rotation curves reliably.

Requirement	Target	Why it mattered
Photometric precision	0.001 mag (millimagnitude)	Exoplanet transit depths; reliable asteroid rotation curves
Tracking stability	Sub-arcsecond over multi-hour sessions	5–6 hour exoplanet transits without trailing
Optical quality	Round stars across the entire sensor field	Photometry at field edges as good as field centre
Calibration repeatability	Reproducible bias/dark/flat pipeline	Comparable measurements night-to-night
Response time to new detections	Hours-to-days from alert to observation	Near-Earth Object follow-up at peak brightness
Sky darkness	Bortle ≤2	Adequate SNR on faint targets
Clear nights per year	High (target ~300)	Schedule reliability for time-critical events
Spare-parts logistics	Days, not weeks	Minimize downtime when components fail

I also considered the future data landscape. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST survey will begin generating millions of transient alerts per night. Many will require photometric follow-up from ground-based telescopes, and I wanted to be in a good position to collaborate with other research scientists and observatories when that data stream goes live.

With the research objectives defined, I built a detailed equipment and cost model. I compared optical designs, mount stability margins, sensor characteristics, cooling efficiency, filter compatibility, and long-term maintainability. I projected hosting costs, replacement cycles, and operational reliability. The goal was to build something sustainable, not temporary.

Fundraising

This is the most difficult part of any project: raising funds for planetary defense and research. It meant making other people excited about my research ideas and possibilities.

I drew on a lesson from the past few years — that people get more excited by showing things, even small projects, models, and prototypes, rather than by telling them about things you would do. I was fortunate to have published research from shared telescopes and to have received national and international recognition for that work, including awards at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS), the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), and becoming the first back-to-back top award winner at the Canada Wide Science Fair in 33 years. This helped people gain confidence in my dreams and my ability to make them happen. And sometimes it takes only one person to be convinced to open the door to others.

That is exactly what happened when I presented my project at an annual meeting. One of the dark-sky sites — AstroCamp — was inspired by my science and offered to hold space for me at a reduced rate. Telescope Ontario offered to donate the imaging camera. Celestron offered to donate a mount for testing. This was a wonderful start.

For the remaining funds, I wrote a research proposal in response to a call for proposals from the Masason Foundation, Japan. It was a very educational process — going through their requirements and rules, and determining which aspects of the project they were able to fund. At the end of the proposal review, the Masason Foundation agreed to fund the remote observatory.

Dark-Sky Site Selection: Why Nerpio, Spain

I evaluated hosting options across multiple continents — Australia, Chile, southern Spain, and the United States — against a set of quantified criteria based on my experience operating shared telescopes.

Criterion	Why it mattered	Nerpio, Spain (chosen)
Sky darkness	Faint-target SNR	Bortle 2; Sky Quality Meter ~21.5 mag/arcsec²
Clear nights per year	Schedule reliability	~300
Elevation	Atmospheric stability	1,650 m
Time zone vs Toronto	Compatibility with school day	+6 h (sessions after school)
Weather automation	Equipment safety	Weather-station roof close on cloud/humidity/wind
Spare-parts supply chain	Downtime minimization	EU-based supplier; replacement in days
On-site technical team	Physical interventions impossible to do remotely	Yes (AstroCamp)

That last point mattered more than anything, and I am glad I prioritized it. When you're operating a telescope remotely from 7,000 km away, the supply chain for replacement parts cannot be an afterthought — it has to be a core reliability requirement. Sourcing equipment from a Spain-based vendor eliminated customs delays and meant that if a component failed, it could be replaced in days rather than weeks.

There was also a practical advantage I had not initially weighted: Spain is six hours ahead of Toronto. That time difference allows me to initiate sessions after school, monitor early diagnostics remotely, and analyse data the following morning. The observatory had to function within the constraints of being a full-time student while sustaining long-term research programmes. Selecting the site was as important as selecting the telescope.

Hardware Selection: Reliable, Modular, and Interoperable

I compared specifications, reviewed published test data, and mapped each component against the performance requirements before committing to anything. Below is what was selected and the engineering reasoning behind each choice.

Building the R60: (left) mount installation on a custom permanent pier; (centre) attaching the telescope tube to the EQ8-R mount; (right) optical train integration — camera, filters, and off-axis guider.

Telescope: Ritchey-Chrétien Cassegrain (12-inch, f/6) The Ritchey-Chrétien design uses two hyperbolic mirrors mathematically shaped to eliminate coma and field curvature simultaneously. This is the same optical configuration as the Hubble Space Telescope. For photometry, the star shape at the edges of the sensor matters as much as at the centre. A star that appears elongated or comet-shaped introduces systematic error into every brightness measurement. The RC design removes that error at the optical level.

Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ8-R Pro An equatorial mount must rotate around a single axis aligned with Earth's rotation to track the sky. The EQ8-R is rated for 50 kg payloads with sub-arcsecond periodic error correction, which means that the mechanical imperfections in its gears are small enough to be corrected by the guiding software without introducing residual drift into long exposures. The foundation of millimagnitude photometric precision starts with the choice of mount and its payload capacity.

Camera: ZWO ASI 2600 Mono (cooled) Monochrome sensors are more photometrically sensitive than colour sensors because no light is sacrificed to the Bayer colour filter array on the sensor. Active cooling drops the sensor to below 0 °C, suppressing thermal dark current — the noise that accumulates in pixels over time and would contaminate faint-source measurements in multi-hour sessions.

Guiding: Off-Axis Guider (OAG) + PHD2 A separate guide telescope introduces flexure — microscopic mechanical movement between the guide and science optical paths, which the guiding system cannot distinguish from actual tracking error. The OAG picks off light from inside the primary telescope's optical path, sharing the same tube. The guide camera and PHD2 software measure a guide star's position 15 times per second and send real-time corrections to the mount. The practical result: tracking stable to under 1 arcsecond for sessions of many hours. I was confident in this solution because I had first tried this configuration on my home telescope and it worked well — but there was a steep learning curve in calibrating it to find a guide star even when the sky field is sparse.

Control: PrimaLuceLab EAGLE 6 Pro Rather than running a remote computer connected to a rack of separate USB hubs and controllers, the EAGLE integrates a full Windows PC, powered USB ports, and serial ports into a single unit mounted directly on the telescope. All device control runs through one remote session, reducing the number of physical connection points that can fail and reducing the weight on the mount.

Learning: During the mounting process, I noticed the EAGLE was heating up a lot, which would impact the telescope mirrors. As a result, I moved it to the telescope's tripod.

Vendor Selection and Logistics

Turning a design into reality required careful coordination. I contacted multiple European vendors to compare availability, warranty coverage, delivery timelines, and compatibility across components. Because the observatory would be hosted in Spain, sourcing equipment locally avoided import delays and unexpected customs fees.

I requested quotes from multiple providers to compare prices and get the best deal. I ended up finding Valkanik.com, a Spain-based supplier, to be the most competitive — and they were also the closest to the observatory site. Being in Spain eliminated customs duties, reduced shipping risk, and meant that replacement parts for any faulty component could arrive within days rather than weeks.

Shipping astronomical equipment is not trivial. Optical systems are fragile. Mounts are heavy and mechanically sensitive. Electronics require stable packaging and proper documentation. I coordinated delivery schedules to align with installation windows at AstroCamp and verified that all components would arrive before assembly began.

Each step introduced potential delays, so sequencing mattered. If one component were missing or incompatible, the entire timeline would shift. The process resembled project management as much as astronomy.

Assembly, Collimation, and Polar Alignment

Physical assembly of the telescope took place at AstroCamp on March 18, 2025, with the on-site team.

Three critical alignment procedures had to be completed correctly before the system could produce usable science data.

1. Collimation: Aligning the Optics

A Ritchey-Chrétien telescope is only as good as the alignment between its two mirrors. Misalignment by a fraction of a millimetre — invisible to the eye — produces asymmetric star profiles that invalidate photometric measurements. I used the laser-ring method: a collimation laser projects concentric rings onto the primary mirror, and the secondary mirror's tilt screws are adjusted iteratively until all rings are perfectly concentric. The effect is visible in defocused star images: a chaotic, off-centre donut transforms into a clean, symmetric ring.

Before and after collimation: the laser-ring method aligns the two RC mirrors until the projected concentric rings are perfectly centred.

2. Polar Alignment: Tracking the Sky

An equatorial mount's rotation axis must point within arcseconds of the celestial pole. The first polar alignment attempt achieved arcminute-level accuracy — sufficient for snapshots, but limiting usable exposure times to 5–10 seconds before trailing became visible. A second attempt using the three-point TPoint routine in TheSkyX achieved arcsecond-level accuracy, reducing the pointing error by a factor of roughly 60. The telescope now tracks stably for at least three minutes unguided, and indefinitely with active guiding.

Telescope stays stable while taking a 3 minute exposure of the Eagle Nebula (M 16).

3. The Calibration Pipeline

A raw astronomical image is not science data. It contains three categories of systematic noise that must be removed before any measurement is worth scientific use.

Calibration Frame	Exposure Type	What It Corrects
Bias frames (×60)	Near-zero exposure time	Read-out noise from the camera electronics
Dark frames (×60)	Same exposure & filter as science images	Thermal noise and hot pixels
Flat frames (×40)	Evenly illuminated short exposures	Vignetting and the effects of dust on the sensor or optics

Sample bias, dark, and flat calibration frames. Bias removes read-out noise; dark removes thermal signal and hot pixels; flat corrects vignetting and dust shadows.

Remote Troubleshooting: The Loose Screw Lesson

From 7,000 kilometres away, a physical failure looks identical to a software failure. Always exhaust the physical possibilities before debugging the system.

During one session, the guiding system repeatedly reported that it could not make sufficient corrections to hold a target. I worked through the problem systematically: recalibrated the guiding algorithm, re-verified polar alignment through software, and inspected every configuration parameter. Hours passed. Nothing worked.

The on-site team did a physical inspection and found a single loose screw in the camera adapter coupling. It was introducing micro-vibrations — motion so small it was invisible in the camera images, but detectable to the guide camera as uncorrectable drift. Five seconds of tightening with a screwdriver fixed what hours of remote software diagnostics could not reach.

The lesson was structural, not just practical: remote systems require a diagnostic framework that begins with physical inspection, not ends with it. I've since built a pre-session checklist that includes physical verification steps with the on-site team before I begin any software troubleshooting.

Loose Screw!!

First Light and IAU Recognition

First light occurred on June 12, 2025. The target was the Eagle Nebula — selected not for its scientific value but to evaluate tracking stability and star-shape uniformity across the full sensor field. The camera cooling system stabilised below 0 °C as expected. The calibrated images showed clean, round stars to the corners of the 26-megapixel sensor.

To receive an official IAU Minor Planet Center observatory code, I submitted astrometric measurements of more than 10 Near-Earth Asteroids, each observed on at least two separate nights with 3–5 images per session, alongside full instrumentation specifications for independent verification.

Code R60 means that any position measurement I submit is accepted into the same database that professional observatories contribute to. It marked the formal transition from building infrastructure to contributing to planetary defense.

R60 — MonitorMyPlanet, Nerpio, in the IAU Minor Planet Center official observatory list.

First Science Results

Asteroid (2977) Chivilikhin — Rotation Period

The first extended campaign targeted main-belt asteroid (2977) Chivilikhin: 7 nights, 25 total hours of photometry. By measuring how the asteroid's brightness fluctuates as it rotates — different facets of its irregular surface reflecting varying amounts of sunlight — I derived a rotation period of 6.257 ± 0.001 hours with a light curve amplitude of 1.030 magnitudes, fitting a clean fourth-order Fourier model. The data have been submitted to the Asteroid Lightcurve Database (ALCDEF).

(2977) Chivilikhin: 7 nights of photometry combined into the full rotation period — submitted to ALCDEF.

Exoplanet Transits — ESA Ariel Ground Support

Three exoplanet transit observations were accepted and published by the ExoClock Project, contributing to ephemeris refinement for ESA's upcoming Ariel space telescope:

• KELT-12b transit, July 7, 2025: Transit SNR = 13.43, mid-transit timing O–C = 2.39 ± 3.02 minutes
• WASP-59b transit, August 4, 2025: Transit SNR = 38.61, mid-transit timing O–C = 2.47 ± 0.79 minutes
• KELT-16b transit, August 8, 2025: Transit SNR = 15.01, mid-transit timing O–C = −1.92 ± 1.35 minutes

These results contribute to a coordinated international programme ensuring that when Ariel launches, its target ephemerides are accurate enough to schedule observations precisely.

Three exoplanet transits — KELT-12b (7 July 2025), WASP-59b (4 August 2025), and KELT-16b (8 August 2025) — accepted and published by the ExoClock Project.

What Comes Next

The observatory is now in full science operations. Near-term priorities include expanding the exoplanet transit programme across a broader target list for Ariel, characterising additional asteroid rotation periods and shape models for planetary defense, and beginning multi-filter photometry campaigns to extract colour information about asteroid surface compositions.

Longer term: binary asteroid candidates — pairs of asteroids orbiting each other — whose mutual eclipse events produce photometric signatures that only extended, dedicated baseline coverage can detect. That kind of observation was impossible with shared telescope time. It is possible now.

---

At four years old, I drew Saturn with my best handwriting. At fifteen, I built the instrument. What gets measured next is the open question.