Posts Made By: Steven Jindra

I completed the installation of my small (very small) back yard observatory based on a small plastic shed with a roof that slides back about half way. It beats a tripod in the grass. Easy set up, no wet grass, chigger bugs, or fire ants and less mosquitoes. Easy shut down for the night. Total cost was about $700, not counting telescope equipment. All the wood, including the plywood is ground rated, pressure treated.

This will allow some Astro imaging, primarily with my little Canon M50 that has been modified with the removal of the factory UV/IR filter for full spectrum. I will usually be using either a light pollution filter or a narrowband filter, due to heavy light pollution.

It allows access to about 20 degrees above the horizon in each direction and about 25 degrees for North. I am pretty much limited by the height of the neighbors roofs anyway. If you have a go-to mount, your only concern would be for the scope slewing to hit the roof (to the North on my installation). My mount is push-to with DSC’s, so no problem with that.

Notes on Photos

1. Concrete foundation for pier. 2 ft. 6 in. wide x 1 ft. 6 in. deep round hole, poured with 12 in. deep concrete with rebar, and a 12 in. round riser to about 2 in. above the ground and 4 - 1/2 in. all-thread rods embedded to mount the pier.

2. Setting decking support while fighting the heat with all the tools available (umbrella, fan, and water)

3. Deck, with isolation from the pier foundation to avoid transferring vibrations.

4. Little Plastic Building (4 ft. 8” in. wide x 6 ft. 8 in. deep x 4 ft. 4 in. high) with telescope installed. The roof slides back partially. Notice a little bit of room in the back for storage and a for little shelf for laptop and a short stool. I pretty much have access to all the skies above the neighbors roof lines.

5. Ready to close down.

6. It all fits and closes up nicely for the night. That way I can stop imaging and be in bed in 5 minutes (15 with a shower) and put the telescope away the next morning and leave the mount in place.

Fighting the heat.

The Deck

 Installed.

Ready to Close Up.

Closed.

Hi Ken

I hadn’t done any imaging in about 7 or 8 years. After loosing my first dear wife, I remarried 5 years ago and we decided to keep her house and sell mine, since it was newer and smaller. My scopes and mount were stored/buried in the garage.

With the COVID-19 “stay at home“ it seemed to be a good time to get it going again. So I installed my old pier and a small resin building as an “observatory”. Been having some fun with it since.

I used the PHD2 program Polar Drift Alignment tool with my old Astro Physics AP600E mount. It allows you to set polar alignment by aiming at a star near Polaris and calculates exactly where to place that star with the mount’s alt/az adjustments to achieve an accurate polar alignment. This is great since I don’t have a polar scope, and it makes it relatively easy to do. And the price is right too...free.

Using the above polar alignment with my mount, I am getting a tracking error of approximately 1 arc/second per minute. Since I am stacking images of 1 minute or less with a maximum focal length of 1000mm, I haven’t been using a guide scope/camera, which greatly simplifies set up time.


With your mount and scope and a good polar alignment with PHD2, I believe you can do fine without a guide scope/camera.

Have fun.
Steve

Hi Ken

Probably included too many details in my reply above.

Bottom line. With your equipment and a good polar alignment, you should be able to get good 2 to 3 minute images for stacking without using a guide camera. In heavy light polluted skies, even with a narrow band filter, that may be as long as is practical anyway, even with a guide camera.

So I would recommend going with what you have.

There are a lot of good narrow band targets high in the sky at just the right time of night right now.

Steven