When my wife Lynn and I decided to retire we wanted to downsize and move out of the home in Danville, California that we lived in for 29 years. We wanted to move to a place that is less crowded and have a great astronomy-friendly sky. So we found a house on 5 acres under a Bortle 3 sky in Monterey County and borders on San Luis Obispo County. Perfect for a roll off roof observatory.
Although I’ve done a lot of home improvement projects over the years, this was the first stand-alone building I would build. We also needed a place for our yard tools so we decided to build a shed as kind of a test run. We learned a lot from that experience and got a lot of ideas for the observatory design. One key element was that installing the roof was much more difficult than we expected, and we ended up with something that was far too heavy to make into a roll off roof. So we reduced the materials, primarily by lowering the pitch to 15 degrees or so and not placing an underlayment beneath the metal roof.
In the summer of 2019 I started building the roll off roof observatory. We used two contractors for the foundation. The first one dug down 12 inches and back-filled the area with class 2 road base. The other contractor poured the concrete and built the piers. Lynn encouraged me to have 2 piers in the observatory so I would not have to remove the optical tubes when I switched telescopes. The piers were separated from the slab by a 1” thick elastomer compound.
Framing started in 2018. I deliberately made the observatory 12 feet by 16 feet so I could use common lumber lengths efficiently. The walls were to be 6’ high. That would insure I wouldn’t have to duck in the observatory except slightly to go through the door. I made the piers tall enough so the telescopes could point as low as 10 degrees above the horizon. We have hills, trees and the house all around the observatory, so I deliberately picked a placed where I had a view down to 10 degrees in all directions.
The electrical was put in when we had our pool installed and I recently ran an ethernet cable for Internet access. Not surprisingly, if I built it again I would change some things, but all-in-all I’m very happy with the way it turned out.
In February of 2020, at 3 am when it was 20 degrees F, my friend Brian Hill joined me in inaugurating the observatory. The things we do to avoid the moon. In October 2022 I joined him to inaugurate the observatory he built at Deep Springs College.
Of course I didn’t do this entirely on my own. Lynn helped throughout the project. We tried to work as a team the best we could, and we mostly succeeded but most importantly stayed married, but I probably haven’t apologized enough to her to convince her to help me with a future project of this size.
In addition, my neighbor Gary F. helped me with some of the heavier stuff like the roof support structure and my son-in-law Tom helped on occasion. On the prototype (i.e. the garden shed) my neighbor Pat was an immense help with the terrifying job of installing the roof and my neighbors Gary B. and Linda B. helped tip up the walls. Gary B. was also my lumber consultant.
Configuration
So as it stands I have a Celestron C11 EdgeHD mounted on a Losmandy G11 and a Stellarvue SV102 app refractor mounted on a Losmandy GM8. I use Tele Vue eyepieces and ZWO cameras. I use a Mac mini and KStars/Ekos for control.
If you’d like to know a few more specifics on the observatory please write me.