Just as the sun never set on the British Empire, today it never rises on the Las Cumbres Observatory. “We keep you in the dark,” its founder Wayne Rosing is fond of saying.
Rosing, a godfather of early computing, who made a fortune at Apple and Google, was always an admitted space junkie. He had long puzzled over a major dilemma facing astronomers studying the cosmos: Telescopes, no matter how large, could only view a narrow, stationary window into the universe. As the Earth turned and clouds drifted, the night sky disappeared.
In the early 1980s, Rosing began to envision a connected network of telescopes, even relatively small ones, which would allow for 24-hour examination of the stars. This would be a critical tool to study fast-moving and one-time events such as an asteroid whizzing past Earth or a supernova exploding thousands of light-years away. But back then, the technology didn’t exist for such an expansive undertaking; the Internet as we know it was still a decade away.