If you have read any of my blog posts before, you may notice that I have a lot of hobbies. I do and I don't apologize for it. I wish I had time and resources to just pursue my hobbies all the time. But alas, I don't, so I am a serial hobbyist. Most of them don't warrant a blog post, but I decided that it was time I brushed off the ol' blog site and document this one.
Lately, I've rediscovered my childhood love for astronomy. And since I already have a passion for photography, I've started becoming an astrophotographer. So after a summer and fall of hauling equipment in and out of the house every clear night I could, I decided that building an observatory would make life a lot easier on me.
It started with a hole in the ground. I started digging into the red clay of my backyard a few weeks ago. right before we had 10 straight days of rain.
Using these post hole diggers I was able to get down about 40 inches before it became too difficult to operate the handles unless I made the hole wider. It's roughly 14 inches square and I didn't want to go expand it any more, so I stopped there. Hopefully I'm far enough below the frost line here in upstate South Carolina that it won't be an issue.
The idea here was to set a concrete footing with rebar then to pour a concrete pier on top of that upon which I could attach a plate that would support my telescope tracking mount. That plate is actually a brake drum just the right size to support my Orion Sirius EQ-G mount head.
In this photo you can see that I've already laid out the perimeter of the building. This will be an 8 foot by 8 foot shed with a roll off roof. The pier is placed as near to the exact center as I could manage. The cardboard tube is a little over 8 inches in diameter and is filled with concrete, rebar and the anchors holding the break drum mounting block in place. The building will be constructed around the pier an no part of the building will be in direct contact with it. This is to prevent vibrations from the structure from interfering with the long exposers needed for astrophotography.
I have looked at lots of other people's observatories and there are a lot of different ways to design and build them. I really love the dome style construction that I'm sure most people think when they hear the work observatory. I just don't have to stills to build a dome and the professionally made domes are outside of my budget.
Here are a few more photos of where I am so far. Floor joist are in and I've made cuts for the subfloor to leave space for the pier to be independent form the rest of the structure. I will end up using some sort of foam sealer to file the gaps, but nothing that will transfer vibration.
This is where I am today. I'm going to let the concrete in the pier cure for at least a week before I put any weight on it. Right now I'm just covering it at night to keep the dew or frost off of it.
Once it has properly cured, I'll remove the form and install the floor. When I do that I'll run some conduit from a space on the pier to carry electrical and data cables to the telescope mount.
I will have my old laptop installed in the shed and connected all the equipment, I will be able to remotely control the system from the comfort of my home. But, all that is down the road.
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