Who is the owner and founder of CASTOR?

Michael A. Earl is an experienced astronomer who has been tracking satellites with professional telescopes and CCD cameras for fifteen years. He has designed hardware and software specifically for optical space surveillance.

He designed, supervised, tested and operated the first remotely controlled autonomous optical satellite tracking facility in Canada; the Canadian Automated Small Telescope for Orbital Research (CASTOR) facility, for the Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada.

Today, he has detected and tracked over 4,000 individual satellites as part of the CASTOR research project. This is the first time that such an endeavour has ever been attempted or accomplished in Canada.