![]() ![]() The size was fixed by the floor, which was 8 ft x 8 ft, easily constructed from two full sheets of wood butted together. Why would I want that? I was anticipating that if I ever had to move, I could take it with me rather than starting from scratch again.Ĭompared with the detailed planning that I had already done for a larger observatory, Star Gully was surprisingly designed on a couple of sheets of paper. I wanted the observatory to be modular, by which I meant it should come apart into components, and then 1 or 2 people can carry them around. ![]() As cheap and as simple to construct as possible if necessary it could be taken down and moved.It had to store my telescope completely set-up, so I didn't have to do any assembly to observe.It had to be less than the footprint (100 square feet) that required permitting.The key points in designing and constructing the observatory were: This particular design is of a variety known as a " fliptop" or " clamshell." It was built on the cheap, in a single weekend. The observatory described in this Instructable is called " Star Gully Observatory" (a joke, because I always wanted to call my planned big observatory " Starlight Basin Observatory"). Having spent many wonderful nights in my own small observatory, I see exactly what he meant. di Cicco said he built his original small observatory as a stop-gap while he planned for a bigger one, but it worked so well he observed in it for nearly a decade. I was inspired by Dennis di Cicco's Doghouse Observatory, which he described in Sky & Telescope (June 2000, page 125). So I devised a plan to have a Tiny Observatory. Shoveling an observing area and setting up and tearing down the telescope in the cold was going to be a severe detriment to observing. I was, however, faced with a pressing problem: I like to observe, and in the Rocky Mountains there is a LOT of snow to contend with for much of the year. Like many amateurs, I dream of having a large spacious observatory (of the roll-off roof variety), but after a scan of my local building codes and looking at the permitting process, and after many long evenings of planning and working out costs in a spreadsheet, I decided a big lavish observatory was probably still many years in my future. There are as many ideas and implementations for observatories as there are amateurs who have built them. Some are spartan and utilitarian, and many are lavish with amenities and decorations. Some are built on housetops and some are built on stilts to see above trees. Many have roll-off roofs, so the observatory masquerades in the backyard as an ordinary shed. Many are classic domes that scream observatory when you see them. If you browse amateur observatories on the internet, you know there are stunning examples. You can observe until you're so tired your eyes won't stay open, then you close the observatory up and you're in bed in less than 5 minutes. You can pop open the observatory and observe the Moon for 10 minutes before the kids go to bed just as easily as you can spend an entire Friday night observing the Cosmos, from dusk until dawn. Your telescope lives in the observatory, completely set-up and calibrated. More than anything else you can do, it makes using your telescope easy. If you're an amateur astronomer who loves spending time out in your backyard with your telescope, one of the easiest ways to increase your time under the stars is build an observatory for your telescope.
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