It says something about the desperate current financial situation we are in that I need to write this entry, and it makes me quite sad to do so.
The New Forest Observatory is a dedicated picture-taking telescope (i.e. you can’t see through it) housed in a fibre-glass dome and located in my garden in Brockenhurst in the New Forest. It is my hobby – it is not a professional observatory with paid technical staff, so I am sorry, but there are no job vacancies at the NFO. In addition, as stated above, you cannot “look through” the telescope as it is permanently fitted to a cooled astronomical CCD camera and so there is no eyepiece at all to look through. If you would like to work at a professional observatory (and you have a very good science degree qualification) check out the Canary Island telescopes and see if there are any current job vacancies, they do advertise quite regularly. Or – if you would like to take your own deep-sky images (you would need to process the raw data you download) then check out the many “rental scope” offers on the Internet where you can buy time (at what I consider are extremely good rates) on a big telescope which will take images of your chosen object for you, and then send you the image data via the Internet for you to process in your own time.
I only wish I was sufficiently financially loaded to be able to take on keen young people to work at the NFO, but like most amateur deep-sky imagers in the U.K., I am not in that income bracket and I’m never likely to be in that income bracket unless I win the Lottery, and of course there are millions of others wishing for exactly the same thing as me.
