Observatory Tour - One Size Does Not Fit All!

[Music] hey everybody it's amy astro here and i am at my favorite place in the world deer lick astronomy village and guess what we have a special thing going on today we are going to observe or we are going to tour an observatory and this one is just a little bit different than the last one so this style might actually interest some of you guys who need a combination of storage and office space and a little bit of playroom all right so let's go check it out so [Music] hello stranger come on in hey how are you doing oh having a blast this morning all right so thank you for letting us tour your observatory we're always welcome to come on bye all right world this is eric and he is the hello world of this observatory yep so eric what do you want to show us first well you can see this is the actually the second observatory out here second observatory yeah the term i take the first one so this is the new and relatively new and improved six-year-old observatory okay so this is six years old the moral of the story is be careful who your termite guy is understand that so but this is the rebuild but this is a little bit different than you might have seen in other ones this is not manufactured by like one particular company the roll-off section is actually based off the skyshed design but the rest of it is kind of my own design not only do i do astronomy out here imaging and visual i do both but i also work from out here the uniqueness of my job so i've spent a lot of spend about half the summer out here with my son um working and back and forth through the whole year but you're welcome to take around i got the wall of parts over here all right this is you know you end up with imaging and stuff a bazillion one spare parts and spare telescopes so that the top is actually a binocular stand okay um so short people and tall people can look at the same thing look at there you gotta talk also yep i got a toa 130 with a robo focuser and old bits and pieces and more just boxes of bits and pieces adapters spare rigels that's not even the eyepiece collection but more unique is that scope over there that is an ngt-18 that is an equatorially mounted inch newtonian on what's called a split ring mount so that actually guides i've put an auto guider on that i've taken pictures with it they're unique telescope you don't see a lot of them anymore um but it's a really cool scope it's a little different than a dob so if you're using it for visual which is what i use more than anything else with it it doesn't move like a normal knob because it's not just up down left right it's equatorial so it takes a little use to get to but it's a fun scope oh this is the storage area the storage area back there more storage boxes that's part of the eyepiece collection the solar scope more tripods more mounts no i joke at work the telescope's outnumber the people um my work set up that i also work i work from out here as well as image but that's more of the imaging side okay well where's the fun welcome to come up here if you wanna you want to come up this is where the scope is i'll let you it's about three steps up yep three steps up no hand rail be careful be careful don't fall so what i have these days is a mead lx850 on here and i flop around swap around with the tubes um i really like it the starlock is a lot of fun just from guiding i found that i can do a lot of stuff i just shot an eclipse and parked it on the eclipse um without even doing any much of a polar alignment i just turned it on went to the moon told it to guide it stayed on the moon the entire eclipse nice so it is really nice and simple balancing is a challenge that's the worst thing with it is just getting the balance right this is a modified sky shed so you can see the garage wells garage rails for it so it's kind of a skyshed design but it's very different than a normal sky shed the pier i pulled the cover off here so here's the man trap don't step through but that is vented to keep bugs out with mesh and vibration isolated so what i have is a bell under the ground for the pier it's about a cubic yard of concrete so it comes down as a bell shape and then it comes up with a sona tube into the bolts for the metal part of the pier the metal part appears great because i can get smaller ones taller and shorter ones as needed but i'm also vibration isolated so i can walk around here while imaging and i don't move the scope at all no that's great where some of the folks out here have just bolted their telescopes to the floor they got to be careful of the vibration which you don't see on whitefield but when it's galaxy season and i put the richie on here you absolutely need the vibration so like other observatories i have the southern drop wall so this wall drops for a great southern view oh nice um it's nice i just had the observatory painted and the painters painted the drop wall closed so i got to spend an hour or so cutting the drop wall free that's the downside there's always maintenance in an observatory yes um when i the roof i don't have it computer controlled i know i have a computer controlled telescope but my roof is manual um i can actually move it just by picking it with my hand and just sliding it back and forth but because there's other sort of people in the world i have a halter on it and i can just literally grab it and slide it or i can just move it by hand so it's not that hard to move the roof there you go so no need to put a computer on it right now but when i get just back i can pull our line so it's just tall enough yeah i like that so it's small which is probably my biggest regret this is only a 10 by 10. anything i want to put in here for one scope is fine but i'll never get two scopes in here so if i was building completely again i'd consider it this is also raised and it's for heat we live in the south we constantly have heat because this is raised and it's cooled underneath and open i get cold air floor comes in air comes up and cools it and i've actually tested it we're taking buildings that aren't raised at the same time i put a thermometer here i put thermometer in the storage shed this is always cooler this is almost ambient temperature year-round okay so it's self-cooling that brings a question for me right now i'm researching an observatory for myself i don't have the building skills to build a roll-off roof so i would have to pay somebody and that's very expensive but i am looking at getting myself possibly a next dome and building it on a deck of some kind in my side yard so would you recommend that i raise that deck up three or four feet the the raising here only works because i have a roof on here and i get convection right i get colder air coming in from the bottom it comes up through here and it brings colder air in hot air goes out and so the inside temperature in here stays about the same as outside temperature i don't have a situation where i'm indoors and this is 120 and it's 99 outside okay okay when you put a dome like a next dome you could raise it but you're gonna have to have the floor open and you're also gonna have to have a way for there to come out the top so check with your dome manufacturer well they do have a um a vent fan that you can put off on the side but if i made a hole like this in the middle of my deck with the bug screen and all that it might work i did some math on here and figured out my vent roof to make sure i had enough airflow josh yeah it's a little yeah somebody loves math yeah it's a nasty thing um for the hobby we chose it might work the other thing just if you build i mean like how people go you get an observatory you have to have a dome because i want a dome i want i know might want to dome right the beauty of this is look up and what do you see you see sky you don't see a little slit of sky i've worked in a professional observatory i've run big 36-inch telescope i spent a ton of time on a 14-inch tail telescope i've been doing astronomy since i was believe it or not i was actually once yeah tall i was okay believe it or not you know several days ago and i did i've done a ton of astronomy and i've worked in domes where you have the dome and then you gotta rotate this dome with the slit to make sure the scope's looking through it right and then automatically i've done events where we forgot to check the dome and i'm sitting there guiding by hand back when you had to guide a telescope without robotic guiders so you're seeing looking eyepiece looking at the crosshairs on the star whacking the paddle going like a video game there you go with some patience and then they start to slowly fades away and you go oh crud the dome didn't move so you gotta move the dome to get the slit back in spots i got you so if you get an automated one if you get an automated one and it's online and it all works that's great sometimes with anything with technology and i'm a technology guy i understand the technology doesn't always work um but the domes are great just from the portability of them they're great because all the automation can be built in with the right dome manufacturer you can build them on a deck but like how i built this um this is not that hard for a general contractor to build you can get the plans for the roll-off section real easily most of them once they know what you're going to do and they get over the idea that the roof is going to roll yeah they can do the roll-off section real easily okay and they're going to charge you way to build a regular building okay so when i rebuilt like i said this is the second one and when i rebuilt this when this one was rebuilt and the termites got it some of this building survived the roll-off section mostly survived the termites eating it but there's still a couple things that had to be done the builder had no problems with it okay you know made a couple things sure make sure the tracks are level make sure that the square when he had to read because only two of the walls survived in here so make sure the the tracks the building is properly square you don't have a lot of problems then it's just weather well that's why i was wondering if you had to have a specialized contractor no a general contractor that can follow plans they're going to build these walls these are built you can see just like a normal wall yeah right you know i have osb here because i thought i'd hang stuff on and i've never hung stuff on it but these are just built like regular walls so the only real difference is the roof and if you look on this design i just have a 4x4 up at the top structurally and this four by four transitions to another four by four here and the reason i have the two transitions and this is something if you build one this is my outside four by four this is inside four by four if the outside four by four ever needs to be pulled off i this way this is designed i can actually pull the lag out that's holding this in and i can pull the other leg out here so i can pull the this pull these two lags out that frees up this whole 4x4 that could be slid off and replaced so it's actually designed but clever the 4x4 sits here and there's other beams here and here for the weight so it holds the weight okay so here i can just undo the couple lags then close the roof and the both four by four is on this side and that side will pull off so this looks like it's truly set on a garage door platform not the v and the roller blades no this is not this is the garage door i'll close it up a little bit there you go you can see all the garage door rollers it has some advantages and disadvantages one it's easy to move the roof you don't need a motor you have a size limitation on it but you don't have to move you don't need a motor to move it the other advantage is some of the guys with regular roofs and there's been a couple times the roofs have gone up and here the roof will never go up it's protected from going up or down so you don't have wind issues with this no i don't have to worry about the roof flying off well that's good because it's structurally not going to fly off the only thing is i do have and i'll close it up here is when i close that up all the way maybe a little dark i'll give your camera a chance to adjust so when i close it up all the way and i'm done i have this latch that goes here just to prevent the whole roof from sliding backwards so i'm curious about this yeah you got on your wall that's not an image i took but a friend of mine ryan has been doing digital artwork forever his whole career is that and he has a website called digital blasphemy okay and he does digital artwork he's been doing it for his whole career basically that's one of his pieces which i loved and that is a canvas that he will you can get canvases printed and that one he signed as well and that's just one of his art pieces but some of his pieces are so close to real it's scary this beautiful digital art you've seen his art on a couple things he's done he's had background shots and posters and cards you're going to have to explain to me what the object in the middle is about it's basically you're staring at the stars in the stars okay it's a canoe a guy laying in the canoe okay that's what i was missing come from the angle here let me show you one other if you your yes so one other key thing with the observatory is this got rebuilt one of the problems in the old observatory is i do visual and imaging i'm not duck out here dearly okay some people here just do one or the other sure and i like both i like imaging because i like taking the pictures but i also like looking at things and even though it's totally different version of astronomy which is why i use 18 more for visual but i wanted to keep it in an air-conditioned climate this room right air conditioned year-round but during the summer it's like 83 but it it better for the mirrors so they're not sweating all the time sure when this was built if you notice like the storage shelf rolls everything that rolls all this little stuff can move our little space heater for the summer or for the winter this door is actually a handicapped door for a reason had fun with the builder on why did you get a door so big i want a handicap door because when i open up this door uh-huh and you look here i have a straight shot for the 650 pound telescope that i just roll stuff out of its way i got and that telescope rolls right down this concrete pad and we're here on the big concrete pad with power because it needs power and i have a great spot to do visual at night and a spot for people my own little canoe so my son and i will when it's not 99 humidity out here we actually will lay on the bench like that canoe in the picture which is we did this before that picture and even when he was a little when he was little we would come out here and we would put a pillow in the pillows in the center head to head feet either way when he was smaller my feet didn't have to dangle yeah yeah we've talked about we need a longer bench because with i'm 6'5 he's 6'3 he's still 16. he just turned 17. he's still growing we're going to need a longer bench you are going to need a longer bench create an l-shaped bench yeah we've talked about options but then i'll do visual out here okay so i can you know i have people i've guessed that can sit i can do visual so that's a little bit different too no that's that's the old pad that's the other thing the old observatory was too small it grew that's the old pad it was too small i grew to the big pad that's the guest pad well that's the option of having all of this land out here at deerlick yep is you've got options i mean you've got neighbors but they're not really close by they're not close by and look at this view everybody i mean this is why i love deer look it's wide open i mean that's the south i bet you can get omega centaurs in here i can imagine so i'm also one of the founders of deerlick too we didn't mention that but yes i'm actually one of the folks that got deer like started okay and helped build this place out i remember when this was all little scrub trees newly planted trees here and we rented a bulldozer they gave a whole bunch of geeks a bulldozer heavens and we did a lot we did a lot of the clearing off and been watching this place where this was just dirt and now we have grass here we have people here we have observatories here we even have leaf slots here so a little for deerlick so we have a new phase of these slots just a couple properties up that way okay we have a couple slots for cell and the advantage of least lot is you build your own observatory but you don't have to worry about mowing it you don't have to worry about having a house to maintain you just have an observatory and we have several of those on the lease lots we have a couple of those for people who are interested in joining derelict astronomy village how do they do that and who's allowed well derelict is allowed anyone can join deer lick we're not exclusive other than you have to have a membership to use the field and that's the only thing we ask that's what we like to hear there's rules on the field on white lights there's rules that are astronomy friendly the field the bath houses all have red lights i have red lights in here my cabin over there is completely lit with red lights it freaks out guests because they're like i turned on the light switch and a red light turned on like yeah that's for night time um yeah so we don't have to worry about it so but otherwise deer like just go to the website deerletgroup.com and you can sign up for a field membership the other thing is you're talking about like an observatory what do you get you know what you have we have i've worked with domes i've worked with roll offs i personally prefer a roll-off if i don't need the wind protection that a dome gives you which here i don't need and the advantage to me of a roll-off is i roll the roof off i don't worry about it i have a huge sky there's wide field i can shoot in a roll off i can't shoot in a dome you get to a certain amount of white field you ain't shooting that in a dome it's just not going to happen okay so what would you say your limit would be wide field 50 millimeters it depends on well if i put a camera lens on it depends again do the math because oh math i know you hate it but how far is the slit from the camera because if the camera is closer to the slit you get a wider field if the camera is farther back you get pictures of an observatory roof oh those are cool yeah okay i got you so there's no easy answer what i can say in a dome you're probably not going to shoot a 50 millimeter wide field you will probably not even shoot an 85 millimeter wide field you have a very near degree field of view so you're not going to be doing the big white field you want to do whole constellations you're probably not going to do that in a dome okay unless you've dome is set up where your pure is high enough and your scope is close enough to the slit the problem there is you got to get it up really high you got to get close to the slit and you could be at a point where it might be close to the slit if you're north and when you go south you're farther from the slit okay if you don't center it you made a comment about a dome was good for wind protection why is the roll-off not good for wind if you're in a really windy environment like on the top of the mountain the wind comes in the in the room okay i guess i didn't think it i thought it would just kind of skate over the top you can come in i've been out here where we get 20 mile-an-hour gust at night and the wind wind picks up i wouldn't even try to image it i wouldn't try the image but i had the roof open it was clear i mean come on it was a new moon and it was clear and because of the tracks it wasn't lifting up i wasn't worried about the roof or anything but i was really trying to get some time in and you know i was getting a little breeze in the observatory and that wasn't fun but domes are traditional and they have their place it's me personally i prefer a roll-off it's just simpler if you get a dome just make sure you have to really worry about field of view you're not doing wide field in the dome easily okay because think about it if you're in a dome and you're looking out of your slit if you're only seeing 10 15 degrees that's all you're going to shoot that's true you know you're not going to see more than what you can see through the dome slit great so if you like whitefield yeah okay so that's something else for me to consider it's something to consider and there's nothing wrong you can do both the beauty too is is so easy now with these mounts that almost auto polar line you you have polar max you have all these tools you can put a little mount on the ground you can polar align it in 20 minutes and you're good for the whole night okay so you could still do both um when i rolled the 18 out here i stuff the polar alignment because it's not permanently mounted sure and i kind of know where i can shimmy it on the ground yeah yeah we know our spot i know my spot so i can get polar line pretty quick with it there you go there you go you know so i'm pretty good at that but that's the advantage domes are traditional though but honestly i prefer a roll-off that's my preference but we have people here that have had domes well see my original preference was i wanted to build a roll-off but when i started research it looked like i was at a minimum of twenty thousand dollars to depend on your contractor and how big yeah well you can go to backyard observatories and they've they built a lot of observatories here in their turnkey right right he comes out he builds it it's all gonna be built his requires big motors so they're heavy roads you're not going to roll them off without a mo motor on them but that also has some you know wind advantages weight's not necessarily a bad thing but you're going to have to get a motor with them if you go with a sky shed plans you can download those well guys as luck would have it my camera overheated twice during that observatory tour so it might be time for me to upgrade my camera say goodbye to it i don't know but thankfully you guys got the idea of what type observatory this was this was a multi-purpose building it took care of him being able to work from home it handles some storage it handled uh observatory which was really nice he had the forethought to make the door wide wide enough for a um like handicapped door and that was so he could get his other telescopes in and out easily i kind of wish i had a handicap door on my house right now because then i could actually bring like my jmi wheelie bar into the house and store it rather than keeping it in the garage i'm not really liking having to keep it out there but mostly because it just won't fit through the door what i did learn was a 10 by 10 observatory is too small it only will hold one telescope i would like to have the option of having two telescopes if i want to telescope so i think i'm going to have to shoot for something bigger i'm still torn between a roloff roof and a dome observatory i like the concept of both of them a dome observatory i can purchase as a complete kit build it myself and 100 percent automate it all within my budget with the exception of i still have to build a platform for it to sit on and i have to get electricity to that spot because i really don't want too long extension cords going from the house to my location that would be kind of cheesy and a roll-off roof which was always my first preference will require some building skills that i just don't have it's not that i'm not capable of learning but i would need somebody who is experienced in building to help guide me in the correct direction so i don't do something stupid and have the roof fall on me anything is possible but guys thank you so much for hanging out with me today and checking out eric's observatory it's really cool thank you eric for letting me join you i'm sorry i lost your exit on the video but you know it happens sometimes and usually happens to me well guys i'm wishing you guys some great help clear skies and don't forget i love each and every one of y'all goodbye y'all oh don't forget like subscribe share with all your astro friends okay help me grow not with donuts okay help me grow my subscribers thanks guys love you [Music] [Music] i was tempted [Music] tempted by your smile i was tempted and for a little while i was certain that i will be the one to change [Music] [Applause] [Music] the promises the eyes just keep [Music] [Music] how could i believe you [Music] [Music] tempting no one ever changes no one [Music] goodbye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Amy Astro

Views: 16,250

Keywords: home observatory, observatory telescope, backyard observatory, roll off roof observatory, roll off roof observatory with warm room, observatory tour, amyastro, custom observatory, multipurpose observatory build, dome vs roll off roof, dome, home office, home observatory telescope, backyard observatory ideas, home observatory design, home observatory ideas, Observatory roll-off-roof

Id: 6y1Q14wlx-g

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022