The exterior of the building is now complete! This view shows the east side of the observatory (and a bunch of clouds, which are completely incompatible with the idea of an observatory). Note the 4-foot entry door in the east wall. (There's no floor inside the building yet, but you weren't supposed to notice that in this picture :-)
It's hard to believe the day has finally come. After spending almost an entire year just getting the basement built and buried, the above- ground part of the project was completed in just 4 months. To be sure, a lot of work remains on the interior, but that's all much more conventional construction.
Yes, that big roof in the foreground actually fits on the tiny rolloff steel frame to the north in the background! (Wide-angle lens, perspective distortion, etc., etc.)
The roof is still too difficult to roll, but at least we're down to only needing three people to do it, so we're probably at the point where a heavy-duty winch can handle the job.
The eave flashing still interferes with the siding, but we have now studied that problem to death, and are about to get ready to begin to prepare to fix it for sure!
By the way, say goodbye to these clouds. The end of this monsoon season marked the beginning of a multi-year drought in the desert southwest; after fighting rain almost continuously while building this building, now there would be almost no rain at all for more than a year!
What remains now is installing the observing-level floor, building the piers for the telescope mounts, and putting in the electric hoists to stack and unstack the telescopes and mounts. (The optical tube of the Hypergraph will weigh over 100 pounds all by itself; I fairly quickly decided that lifting that up to eye level with one hand while threading nuts onto the mounting bolts with the other hand would not be a workable procedure).
And then, of course, there's finishing out the basement ...
The basement sat uncovered for four months before we got the roof put on; during this time, quite a bit of desert dust and sand accumulated on the floor -- enough to fill eight five-gallon buckets. After clearing that out, we swept and vacuumed the entire floor three times, followed by two moppings, in order to get the floor clean.
Note the temporary lighting, hanging from the center beam by pieces of bent sheet metal. This worked well until some real lighting got installed, and these 8-foot fluorescent fixtures wound up in the rolloff roof to serve as lighting for the observing floor.
Next up: Observing floor
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Terry R. Friedrichsen
terry@venus.sunquest.com