A patch of land east of Fresno is a gateway to the galaxy. Why astronomers love it

Keith Quattrocchi’s first foray into astronomy was as a child looking at the stars over Sonoma County through a telescope that was a gift from his dad.

It was just a small thing, this telescope, but he put it to good use.

“I was out every night with it,” Quattrocchi says, “rediscovering things that had already been discovered.”

Decades later, on a much larger telescope, he captured his first pictures of space: images of Orion Nebula, or Messier 42 to astronomers. That was a revelatory moment.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god. This is real,“ Quattrocchi says.

“I wonder what else is up there that I don’t know about.”

It’s a grand sort of question and one of many being researched at Sierra Remote Observatories (or SRO), a five-acre facility Quattrocchi co-founded in 2007. It has become a hub for hobbyist astrophotographers, but also those doing professional research and other work in the space industry.

There are currently more than 150 telescopes at SRO inisde 14 nondescript beige buildings tucked in the middle of an apple orchard on a hillside on the western edge of the Sierra Nevada near Auberry in eastern Fresno County.

Eight 10-by-12-foot buildings sit on low stilts, paired off on either side of a dirt road. These were the first buildings on site, designed mostly as private observatories. Six larger buildings keep multiple professional and research-level telescopes for an array of clients including NASA.

All of the buildings have automated roll-back rooftops that are synced to GPS time and open at 3:40 p.m. every day, conditions permitting.

While SRO seems almost like a ghost town during daylight hours, the place comes to life at night, says Sam Miller, one of two technicians working at the facility.

Miller grew up just a few miles away from SRO. While he was in high school, he’d walk over to bug whoever was there. Eventually, he worked his way into a job and a spot for his own telescope and camera system.

“Pretty pictures is all I’m using it for,” Miller says.

The telescopes, he says, “they all have a job to do.”

His job, and a big lure of SRO, is to make sure that happens without a hitch and that “your telescope will be happy.”

The perfect patch of sky

There are other reasons, SRO has become popular among astronomers.

For one, the facility sits beneath a particularly unique patch of sky. Quattrocchi found it while researching a move to the Central Valley for work.

“I looked at a map. I saw (Highway) 168 and I thought, ‘That looks intriguing,’” says Quattrocchi, who is a doctor who works as a neurosurgeon with Kaweah Health in Visalia.

Along with a couple of Central Valley Astronomers members, he scouted the area for a potential location and eventually they honed in on this particular spot.

“We knew it was good, but we didn’t really know how good it was.”

For one, it’s secluded without being remote.

At 4,610 feet of elevation, SRO is above the Valley’s inversion layer and free of those air quality and light pollution issues. But it’s still an easy hour’s drive from an international airport.

This make it attractive for those doing remote work.

It also has good weather.

There are clear, dark skies for the bulk of the year (290 days, according to the observatory data) with few thunderstorms and no summer monsoons (something that plagues similar observatories in Texas and New Mexico, Quattrocchi says).

And then there is something called “seeing.”

That’s the word for the relative quality of a telescopic image as affected by the atmosphere. A location’s “seeing” value is counted in arcseconds, with better, clearer views observed as the number approaches zero. SRO has, on average, one arcsecond seeing in the summer and 1.2 arcseconds in the winter.

That is on par, or better, than the best observatories in the United States, Quattrocchi says.

This phenomenon of atmospheric interference is the thing makes stars appear to be twinkling, says Miller, the SRO’s technician.

That makes for nice lyrics in a love song, but not for photographs, especially if you’re focusing on an object for 20 minutes or more with very little incoming light. “You want your stars to just be planted in the sky,” he says.

The entire facility is run on a fiber optic internet network with 1 Gbps upload and download speeds that’s backed up by Starlink.

In the middle of the facility, there’s a telemetry pole that serves as the nerve center. The box of gadgets on top collects live weather data (things like cloud cover and humidity) and relays it to a central server and eventually out to the telescopes.

The telescopes can be run manually — and some are, Miller says — but mostly the whole show is automated.

Hobbyists, researchers, NASA and the space industry

Originally, SRO was built as a private observatory with three buildings and three telescopes.

But, Quattrocchi says, “We found really quickly that people were interested.”

And for a variety of purposes.

Some of the telescopes, like Miller’s, are being used for astronomical imaging: taking pictures of stars or other objects in the sky. But there is also exploration being done, and discoveries being made by the telescopes on the hill. Quattrocchi, along with his partner Mel Helm, are co-credited with discovering the Soap Bubble Nebula in 2008.

“We’ve got people up there now that find these things all the time,” Quattrochhi.

There are astronomers studying studying supernovas and black holes — there’s even someone looking at the sun.

Others are looking at objects closer to the earth. There’s a whole industry dedicated to finding and tracking things as they pass through near or through Earth’s orbit. There are satellites that need to be tracked — and also other objects that might be headed toward the planet.

“They want to catch those well ahead of time,” Quattrochhi says.

It sounds like the plot of the 1998 film “Armageddon.”

Some of the work at SRO seems right out of science fiction.

Transastra is a company that mines asteroids for their resources. Or, rather, it will someday. First it has to find them, which it is currently working to do at three observatories: one in the Arizona desert, one at a research facility in Queensland, Australia, and at SRO.

The space industry companies have tended to be tight lipped about what exactly they are working on, Quatrocchi says.

“When they first got there they said, ‘Don’t tell anyone what we’re doing,’” he says, with a laugh.

“I don’t even know what you’re doing.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2025 at 11:30 AM.