I was gifted with a whole stack of computer-room raised flooring,
which has been put to good use at the observatory.
Part of the floor has been cut out
and replaced with the raised flooring, so it will be easy to run
cables to the telescope piers. This will also provide enough room so
I can crawl underneath the floor as necessary; the raised floor is 27"
(69 cm) above the underlying concrete slab. Looks nice, huh?
Compare that with the way the floor looked just after we started cutting it up.
(Photo by Stephanie M. Friedrichsen)
The interior of the basement living quarters is essentially complete. Sadly, the planned darkroom has been sacrificed for a bedroom, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the difficulty in running a darkroom on a septic tank system. But the bedroom is finished off now, and it is a nice place to sleep!
Upstairs, the observing level is in use. Some photography and CCD imaging has been accomplished as I figure out what custom adapters I need to purchase or have manufactured in order to put together my imaging trains.
Since we finished the basement interior, a number of finishing touches were completed:
Heating and cooling in the basement has proven problematic. On one hand, leaving the basement uninsulated has been a big help in the summertime; even with several computers running full-time, the temperature inside the sealed basement never rises about 81 Fahrenheit (27 Celsius). On the other hand, the heat pump works quite hard to heat the basement in the winter, and for some reason it gets confused when the basement is calling for heat with the outside temperature in the 70s or so in the spring. After running for a couple of days, though, everything in the basement (including the block walls) gets heated; after that, the heat pump is much happier.
With the installation of a gigabit fiber-optic link to the observing floor, each telescope pier has a connection to the BRO network. The telescope mounts, computer-controlled focusers, and CCD cameras can now all be controlled from the basement. This has increased the usage of the equipment quite a bit; I can now image in a climate-controlled, lighted basement, just a few short steps from the refrigerator!
A couple of problems with water getting into the basement led us to create a diversion ditch to direct sheet-flood rainwater away from the observatory building. We also installed a gutter on the east side roof and directed the water out to the ditch through a buried PVC pipe. Of course, since this is BRO, nothing can be standard; the rolloff roof means that the gutter must direct the water into a pipe coming up out of the ground with no connection between the two. The water falls through an air gap of several inches as it drops into the drain pipe.
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Terry R. Friedrichsen
terry@mail.trf.sunquest.com