This post is dedicated to anyone thinking about sending a scope to Chile.  It's a long trip and there are a lot of details that need to be taken care of to insure a trouble free experience.  This whole remote imaging thing with a big scope is expensive and I recognize that not everyone can afford it.  I am lucky enough to be able to pull it off but that doesn't mean that there wasn't any stress involved.  I'm a cheapskate at heart so I took a deep breath, committed to paying some big bills and signed up.  At almost every level, most of us find a way to amp up our addiction to the point where it hurts--and that's what ultimately determines the size and cost of our gear.  With that in mind, this is a brief recap of my experience.

Last summer, I signed a contract with the observatory to have my equipment in Chile sometime in November and after putting so much love and energy into my scope, it turned out to be really hard to take it apart.  I stalled for about two weeks before I realized that I needed to get going if I was going to get it shipped in October.  I've attached just a few photos of the few hundred photos that I took of the disassembly process.  Many of the photos went into an instruction manual for how to reassemble the scope at the other end.   It took me nearly 5 days to pull it all apart, and get everything packed back in the original shipping crates.  I removed the camera/guider package at the focuser and packaged it separately.  It was double bagged and carefully packed into a box that was secured inside the L500 crate.  I carefully mounted everything so that it couldn't move at all.  I had to buy a new crate (from Uline) for the power/PC cabinet.  In total, there were 4 crates with a combined weight of 1,000 pounds.  The receiving address for the shipment was in Santiago and the shipment was handled at the receiving end by a customs agent associated with Obstech.

The most stressful part of this process is that there isn't a single place where you can go to understand what needs to be done, how the import rules work, and how the costs work out for shipping a telescope to Chile.  So, here is what I learned along the way. 

1) For new equipment shipped to Chile, you pay duty (6%) + VAT (19%) of the equipment value, which must be declared on an invoice.  You have to pay VAT on the total value of the shipment which includes your equipment, the shipping cost, and the insurance cost.

2) For used equipment, duty is waived.  You can then insure for replacement value but you also supply a declared value, which has to be within about 10%/year for the age of the equipment down to a minimum of 70% of the new price.  I just multiplied by 80% since my gear was about 2 years old.  That's the value that you pay VAT tax on.  Some folks travel to Chile and take things like the camera or other small, high-value items to avoid VAT but you still have to deal with customs when you get off the plane so that approach involves either not declaring the equipment or seriously undervaluing it.  I don't do things that way--and I wasn't sure when I could visit the observatory, so I simply shipped it all in the crates.

3) There are a LOT of extra charges beyond VAT+duty that Obstech tacks on for bank fees, customs fees, handling fees, etc., etc.  I wound up sending them payment for around $14,400 to cover it all.

4) There are a lot of companies that can provide air freight services.  I used these folks:  https://www.shipnex.com/International-Freight-Shipping/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA15yNBhDTARIsAGnwe0X7v1bVl-P_01PSHJwhTmjwCeWmlVT-jaxvnSmn4pQ8HzkkyWsp8pEaAmY4EALw_wcB.  They are freight consolidators and my shipment ultimately went by DHL.  Shipping costs vary wildly so it pays to get numerous quotes.  I received estimates that ranged from $25k down to $5,654 for shipping and $839 for insurance.  At the last minute (literally, on the day of the pickup), the shipper informed me that if there was a $100/crate charge if they weren't stackable.  PW shipped them to me as "Non-Stackable" so shipping + insurance cost me $6,883.00.  That was in the ballpark of what others told me to expect so I didn't have a lot of heartburn about it.  Remember that's the cost to insure and air-freight four crates that weighed right around 1,000 lbs roughly 7,000 nm.  Smaller crates that weight less will obviously cost less, but brace yourself if you want to send a 24" or a 1 m scope!  That won't be cheap.

5) The shipper supplies an airway bill that you have to print and attach to the crates.  (I used water-proof paper and spray-on adhesive.)  You also have to supply a commercial invoice and packing list to the shipper.  Obstech (or I) can provide example paperwork showing how the packing list and the invoice should look. I also attached these to the crates in a glued on plastic bag.  I also marked the crates with a lot of "Fragile/Handle with Care" labels.  I also attached a label with my return contact information along with the shipping address.

6) When I started on this project I ball-parked a cost of $20k-$25k to get the scope to the observatory and that's roughly how it played out.  These cost all add to the value of a scope already installed and running in Chile.

7) From the time the shipper picked up the crates until I received notification that it arrived in Santiago, it took about 5 days.  It then took another 7-10 days to get through customs and arrive at the Obstech office in Santiago.  I was informed that it might take another 3 weeks to be transported to the observatory but they had it up there in about a week.

The good news is that everything arrived at the observatory in perfect shape and the folks on site begin setting it up immediately.  I supplied a detailed assembly manual to cover the special stuff on my scope and that ultimately helped to get everything installed properly.  Since everything was pre-wired and pre-balanced, they had it up and running in a day; although, there was a SNAFU when the assembly crew didn't get my instructions and the wiring looked like a mess.  When I spotted the problem, they apologized profusely for the mix-up and from a customer support standpoint they handled it really well.   As a result, they had to disassemble almost everything and start over again to do it right.  Still it was done and the scope was up and running within only about two days after arriving on site.

Finally, for anyone sending any scope to a remote location, my advice is to make absolutely sure that everything is working perfectly before you ship it.  My UPS did not work on 50 Hz and I would have known that if I had tested it...so test EVERYTHING.  Take lots of dark and flat data before it ships because it's hard to take that data right after the scope gets set up.  I'm still waiting for my flat and dark panels to be set up and since it's clear almost every night, it's really hard to take flat data.  That's another reason to put alignment marks on everything so that it goes together very closely to the way that you had it before shipment.

Once it was set up, we had to double check the ONAG/guider focus.  When I first started using the scope, the focus setting looked perfect but after a few days, it looked like something shifted--so it required refocusing.  With this scope, I'm using SGP for my main control software and SkyGuard (SG) for guiding and focusing.  I've been using SG in Bend so I'm familiar with it but my experience level isn't very deep.  So, it wound up taking 3 nights to cross check my focus settings before I was comfortable with the way things are working.  I also was making a lot of adjustments to camera settings as I dialed in the system performance and that has made processing some of that data a bit challenging.

Along the way, I took a lot of data--most of it really bad.  But things have improved considerably as I have gotten the scope dialed in.  I've attached a single calibrated stretched 6-minute sub taken with the Lum filter showing a mean FWHM value of 1.34".  I binned this data 2x2 for posting here.  Of course, this is one of the better subs that I've taken so far, but it demonstrates how well the system should work when the seeing is good.

One final note that I want to add is about the operating parameters for the QHY600.  My first images with this camera (M109, M63, and NGC 5907) all used mode 0, gain 26.  After studying the manual in more detail, I decided to switch the settings to mode 3, gain 25.  This mode provides unity gain (i.e. 1 e-/ADU) and about 6 e- of RN, which is nearly half that of my former 16803 camera.  On top of that, the well depth goes to about 65,000 e-.  Up until this point, I've really only thought about 1x1 binning in terms of MTF response; however, I realized that 1x1 binning can be used to increase the effective well-depth for 2x2 binned results by a factor of four.

The QHY manual discusses the need for 18 bits to support 2x2 binning in the camera but the manual does not address how 18 bits are supplied using a 16 bit ADC feeding a data stream with 16 bits for each pixel.  None of that is clear to me; however, there is a simple way to resolve the problem.  By downloading 1x1 binned raw 16 bit data and doing 2x2 binning in PI with the IntegerResample tool using floating point math, the well depth is expanded to 18 bits (i.e. by an additional 4x relative to a 16 bit limit).  This gives added protection against saturating bright stars--well beyond what my former 16803 could provide, since it had to run with 1x1 binning to achieve proper sampling.  So, taking and transferring 1x1 binned data takes advantage of exceptional seeing when it occurs and allows for greater well depth even when binning in post-acquisition processing.  The data files from the IMX455 based cameras are huge (around 117MB) so they take longer to transfer and they more rapidly fill drive space but it's still manageable.  I'd be happy to have someone explain to me how QHY handles 18 bit (for 2x2) and 20 bit (for 4x4) data when binning in the camera itself.  For now, I've settled on working with 1x1 raw data.

I'm being flooded with data but I still don't have a light or dark panel to take current flats or darks.  Still, I'm working on producing a finished image so stay tuned.  I'll get a new image posted one of these days--even if I have to "fake" the calibration to get it done.

John