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 over ten years. He has designed hardware and software specifically for optical space surveillance.

He is especially known for designing, constructing, testing, and operating the first remotely controlled and 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 3,250 individual satellites. This is the first time that such an endeavour has ever been accomplished in Canada by any institution.