High end amateur astronomy - the sort practiced by dentists and MDs - have moved to digital image capture with home observatories often housing equipment worth more than $50,000.
With investments of that size, people are more serious about the location of their observatory and a few are doing remote astronomy (just like the professionals). Of course you need someone to kick the telescope every now and again, so enterprising types are offering telescope hosting - co-location as well as time sharing.
New Mexico Skies is a great bed and breakfast for amateur astronomers and they've been in the remote time sharing business for about a year. You get a 14" Celestron tube on a Software Bisque Paramount ME robot mount. The CCD array is a Kodak 1001E and images are sent via a Tachyon satellite link. All of this for $36k a year. You can also rent time in $5k 100 hour chunks ... a popular option with high schools (they generally find grant money to do this).
Many prosumer amateurs use more sophisticated hardware (although the Bisque robot mount is as good as it gets), but I imagine the good folks at NM Skies could work out a co-locate deal.
8:45:30 AM 
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