Raising a Cylindrical Observatory

(OK, perhaps this whole "jam jar" thing has gone too far. I promise to cease and desist. Really.)

Anyway, a bit of "rib-lath" went up over the sarking felt. This is your basic expanded metal but with angled ribs that hold it out from the substrate about 1/4" so that the plaster can get a good "key" behind the metal. It's a pain in the rear to put on though -- what I thought was a half-day job took 2 of us a day and a half, and we didn't even get the vestibule covered.

You can also see one of the 3/4" plastic pipes around the mid-section. There is one more at the top that's pretty hard to see, and one more still to go on at the bottom. These will act as "grounds" enabling the plasterers to screed the plaster to get a nice, even curve around the cylinder. After screeding, the plastic pipes will come off, and the holes they leave will be filled in by hand.

The plasterers will be out next Tuesday or Wednesday (weather permitting).

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Got the door hung, and the expanded-metal on the vestibule. Those corner-beads are awful hard to get straight....

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Scratch coat going on. This is about 3/8" to 1/2" thick and fairly soupy. One of the reasons they like doing 2-coat work is that this background layer will provide "suction" for the finish coat, allowing it to go on soupy as well, but dry out fairly quickly so they can put a finish on it.

These pictures are pretty poor as it's starting to get dark. This far north, that happens right after lunch (OK, it's not quite that bad.)

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Well, I guess BAX Global got tired of looking at it, so they sent it up a day early. Comes in a BIG crate: roughly 7' x 6' x 4'. The driver kept saying the waybill said it weighed 350, so how bad could it be? (Well, that's 350 _kilos_, so it could be pretty dang heavy.)

We did manage to get it off the truck though, and then broke the crate apart in the driveway and carried all the pieces inside.

There's been a slight change of plans: all the timber I used to level the floor in the old kitchen the last time around is now part of the temporary roof -- so the pre-assembly area will be the breakfast room instead (which has a flat floor. (It happens to be heated as well. )

Only problem is, since the dining room is still full of all the furniture from the library, we need the breakfast room for Thanksgiving dinner. So we're going to have to be quick about pre-assembly....

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The observatory was finish-coated yesterday, and lined out (to look like cut stone). There's a frost warning tonight, so I had to spend a couple of hours in the dark rigging up a makeshift "tent" from ladders, dust sheets, and plastic. (Similar to dew, for a ground frost, you just have to protect the plaster from too much open exposure to the sky.)

Turns out, it's a good thing I went to all that work. We got quite a bit of frost. This picture's from about 9am in the morning.

(Edited: The conditions did produce some rather good seeing. I had the 8" LX200GPS out last night and got some really nice views of Mars. All my favorite globs were too low, M81 and M82 were a bit washed out by the moon, and Orion was still behind a tree, so I stuck with the red planet.)

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Technical Innovations finishes the inside of their domes in a dark blue, which I matched to paint the inside of the walls upstairs. Since there's no fire-break in the walls at floor level, some of the paint misted down to the first floor. The effect is nice though: reminds one a bit of twilight.

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We don't get much daylight in the winter at this latitude, so I got out there early to take off the temporary roof. Rather foggy, but not too cold, and the sun's starting to break through....

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One day after dome completion, we awoke to a surprise. (We don't get snow very often, and almost never an inch or two on the ground.) Makes for a pretty sight, though.

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Here's a picture from two hills away. The bottom version has the observatory cicled in yellow, while the top is untouched. To the right of the observatory is the house, and to the right again is the stable-yard with copper-domed clock tower (which, sadly, we don't own).

-- Jeff.

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