Building the Observatory

Well, its taken almost six months, but I've finally decided its time to build an observatory.  Since bringing the telescope home I have been keeping it just inside one of the overhead garage doors in the garage.  I sprung for the JMI case for the C14 OTA when I originally bought the telescope, and I had purchased a heavy-duty roll around tool cabinet to store the CGE equatorial head, counterweights, and other assorted gear.  Any time I wanted to observe I had to set up the tripod, mount the equatorial head, hoist the scope up on the  dovetail, connect the cameras and computer, then proceed to polar align and 6-star align the mount.  From the time I opened the garage door to the time I could start the first exposure for an evening's work was a minimum of 90 minutes.  The risk of dropping the OTA, the fact that I had already had one night where I connected the wrong power supply to my USB hub (12v instead of 5v) and blew out about $600 worth of gear (camera, hand controller, parallel > USB converter), and just the sheer amount of work and time it took to get started, all argued in favor of something more permanent.

Here are day and night time shots of the prime observing spot in my back yard.  Note the night time shot; the telescope sits just inside the shadow cast by my house blocking the light from the streetlamp that sits just on the other side of the street from my driveway.  The combination of needing to be inside that shadow, along with the location of trees, power lines, my and my neighbors' houses, all dictated a very specific location.  Essentially I had only a few feet of leeway in any direction before significant parts of an already very restricted sky became unavailable.