My (relatively) cheap ‘observatory’
Have you ever set up your telescope only to have unexpected clouds roll in 10 minutes after your session started? Or perhaps you’ve had a long day, you’re tired, and you don’t feel like setting up your telescope, only to regret it the next day because your astro-friends are sharing wonderful images from that night.
If these things sound familiair to you, then I might just have the solution. As someone who had quite a lot of equipment to set up for an astrophotography session, it could easily take me over 30 minutes to get everything where I want it to be, not to mention you’d still have to do your polar alignment every time again.
This often left me demotivated and I’ve spent many clear nights just playing games or watching movies whilst I should’ve been capturing the wonders of the universe. I figured the only way I could enjoy this hobby was to have a permanent setup in the backyard.
There’s different ways to achieve this, for example there’s telescope covers, such as the Telegizmos 365’s, although I’ve heard many positive things about these covers, they didn’t (and still don’t) really appeal to me very much. It just seems quite vulnerable to leave your (expensive) setup under a cover, but maybe I’m just too much of a control freak. Then there’s another option to have your telescope permanently ready to be used, and that’s an observatory. Observatories come in many shapes and forms, you’ve got domes like the Nexdome, there’s also roll-off roof observatories such as the ones from Astrogfk. But you can also get a bit more DIY and create something like I did:
My roll-away observatory
Inspired by the observatory I saw from ‘MikeODay’, I decided this would be the most cost-effective and easy way to realize my dream: An observatory.
Most observatories use a slice in a dome or a roll-off roof type system, my observatory works quite a bit different. Instead of only opening up part of the observatory, it’s the entire observatory that rolls away. Hence the name ‘roll-away observatory’. There is not really any advantages to rolling away the entire observatory, this was simply the easiest and cheapest way of doing things. One thing to note is that this system does make the telescope more vulnerable to wind, but I have not experience any issues with it so far.
How it was built
The first step was to dig a hole for the base of the pier to sit in. I made sure it went quite deep so I’d be sure the pier wouldn’t go anywhere. It also allowed me to test and see how it would eventually look.
I also had to cut a circle shape into the wooden porch for the pier to go through and still have it look as nice as it can look. I think this turned out quite well and it also gave me a bit of confidence moving forward, considering I always feel like I was born with two left hands.
The next step was building the frame for my resin shed to sit on. Obviously it was very important this frame was sturdy, but also allowed the pier to slide through a track in the frame so it could get to the middle of the shed. As you can see on the photos I used a wooden plate as the base and added wooden beams to make it sturdy (it’s upside down on the first photo). Building the resin shed was quite straightforward and was literally just a case of following the manual’s instructions. I decided to build it on the wooden frame because otherwise we would’ve had to lift it up after building and even a resin shed gets quite heavy.
After constructing the resin shed it was time to create the pier itself, when choosing a pier there’s basically two options: A metal pier or a concrete one. The main benefit of a metal pier is that you can simply buy one, screw it down onto a sturdy base (concrete preferably) and you’re good to good. The downside is that metal piers are quite expensive (Think €500 and upwards). The benefit of concrete piers is that they are very very sturdy and super cheap, the downside is that it requires a bit more work. Since this is an observatory on a budget, and I like DIY projects, I opted for a concrete pier.
I decided to do the pier in two seperate pours, first creating a very sturdy base with the metal ventilation tube inserted into it (making sure everything is nice and level!!). From the base I had metal bars sticking up so the two pours would connect nicely. I let this first pour dry for a couple of days and after that we did the second pour, simply filling up the tube all the way to the top. I’m very lucky to have a friend who’s a metal worker, unfortunately he was injured at the time so he asked his friend to create the pier adapter for me. I inserted this adapter into the wet concrete (also making sure everything is level!) and let it dry for another few days.
After all of this hard work the observatory is pretty much done. Now it was a matter of installing all of my equipment and polar aligning (for one final time!!). I did decide at a later stage to create a wooden frame inside the shed to make it a little bit more storm-proof. I also used this wooden frame to install some electricity sockets and a security camera. The entire project has cost me under €1000, which is super cheap for an observatory. I can’t think of a better investment into our beautiful hobby than this, getting ready to image takes me under one minute now, I can roll away the observatory whenever I like and press ‘start’ in NINA.
If you plan on creating anything like this for yourself and you have any questions feel free to contact me, here are some more photos of the project in it’s current state and be sure to check out my gallery to see what sort if images I create with this setup.
