December 12, 2010

I'm back with an update and its only been a month - instead of three months like the last one. We've had two very productive Saturdays since then - on December 5th John and I worked together and then this past Saturday Kristin AND Matt joined John and myself. We completed a lot and are getting very close to having the crew come in to put up the roof.

December 5th was dedicated entirely to working on the steel for the east wall rail supports. As usual we started about 9 AM; the day was pretty cool with temps in the low 60s, breezy and partly cloudy. In the picture below John is on our temporary work platform measuring for drill holes to attach one of our plate supports:



In the picture below John is cutting through the roof into the warm room area. The support beam that will go here will have two vertical plates, inside and outside, and secured with steel bolts through the cement blocks.


The steel beam in front of John's face is the beam to be supported and has not yet been secured in place.

The support piece needs to be fabricated to reduce the span of the horizontal support beam from about 15 feet (the distance from the last direct roof attachment to the support pier) to 7 1/2 feet. Below John is welding the saddle piece onto one of the vertical plates of the support piece.




One of the things we need to do is to grind the end of each beam into a bevel so that we will have a good surface to weld the beams end to end. In the photo below John is doing exactly that but to the beam on the roof. Usually we do that at ground level but we simply forgot and lifted this beam to the roof a bit early.


The partially complete support plate is put in position and welded to the horizontal beam as shown below. Note that the inside vertical plate is not yet attached. There is also a vise-like clamp attached to the plate. That is used to serve as an electrical conductor to the welding machine to complete the circuit and permit the weld to occur:


Before we weld the horizontal beam/support plate to either the observatory wall, the other beam resting on the forward part of the building, or to the support pier, we have to make sure the beam is level. Since the north end of the beam rests on the top of the support pier, we can adjust the end of the beam height with the adjustment bolts at the bottom of the pier that are sunk into the cement footing. A six foot magnetic steel level is attached to the pier to ensure that any height change we make will be corrected so there is no change in the verticality of the pier. John is making that height adjustment in the picture below:

When we are absolutely finished here, the steel will receive additional primer coat and a cap of cement will fill in the narrow space under the steel pier.

One last thing to check is that the beam is straight and it is laying absolutely flat. In the photo below you can see that the beams are lined up in length as perfect as a laser level can make it, the beam is completely flat, and the measured difference in height over the 38 feet of total beam length is only 50/10,000 of an inch - far beyond the tolerances necessary.

We decided to add even more support at this point that was not in our original design. The photo below shows John proudly showing off his work: a twelve foot 2 X 6 beam in place with temporary clamps that was shortly welded vertically to the bottom of the horizontal beam. Additionally, at the steel pier, an L-bracket was welded to the upright and the new beam sits on it and is welded to it, the beam above it, and the pier.

The red box in the foreground of the above picture is the actual 20 amp welder.

The next step was to weld the two beams to the support piece fabricated earlier. Here's a photo of John performing the weld while standing on the platform. Plus you can see the entire east wall's rail support structure with all the support plates and beams in place:




Here's a closer shot of John's welding technique:

That pretty much wrapped up that day's work.

This past Saturday we had the biggest work crew at the observatory since we started. Kristin and Matt joined us for a day in the country and some fun. We apportioned the work so that Kristin would continue the second primer coat everywhere, I would apply primer to all of the top metal wall supports, Matt would do some excavation (to get ahead of schedule by about a year) plus he would help John with the most important work of all - completing the rail support work on the west wall, similar to what he completed the week before.

Matt had not been to the high desert before so this was new to him. The day was perfect - mid-70s, light breeze, and bright sun. Kristin tackled the second primer coat on the outside of the observatory. In this picture, she actually excavated a bit below grade so that she could complete the lowest course of cement blocks. Once the paint dried, she shoveled the dirt back into the trench:

Matt went ahead and dug four sizable holes in the rotten granite that underlays our site. His strength had us in awe. When John and I dug holes in the same spot for the two pier footings, it took us weeks using a jack hammer - Matt dug four holes with just a pick and a shovel - NO jackhammer - and transported 20 barrels of dirt to the front of our driveway by lunchtime!! Here's Matt digging the first hole:

Here he is at the far end of the driveway, raking the barreled dirt to widen our driveway:

Here's a shot of Matt and John showing their appreciation to me when I took time off my hard work to perform the duties of the observatory historian:

Once Kristin finished with the lower course of the outside wall, she came inside to the observing area and put the second coat on all four of the inside observing area walls:

The final horizontal beam for the west wall needed to be cut to size and the ends squared off prior to beveling. Here is John and Matt cutting an 18 foot beam to size - not an easy task. This cut required almost five minutes to complete:

It was about this time that we broke for a short lunch - what a morning's worth of work!

With lunch over, John and Matt went back to the steel work and Kristin and I teamed up on putting the second primer coat on the outside walls. We painted all but the east wall in less than two hours (much easier than when the first coat was applied); we left the east wall to another day because it was in the shade and we felt the wall had already cooled more than we felt comfortable with painting.

Kristin continued priming the stairwell to the observing area. Matt took a break from his heavy duty to help her:

While fabricating the support plates, bolt holes need to be drilled into the plates. Here's a photo of John and myself working on a drill press making those holes:

In terms of the steel work for the west wall, John did much the same work as I described above from the previous week so I've simply posted some photos following with no explanation:

Here we are, end of the day, much more accomplished than we thought, so here's a cute photo of our recently married couple, being re-united after a day of drudgery and serfdom:



Actually, I wanted to show the holes that Matt had dug earlier in the day and this was the only picture showing them.

We are approaching the end of this construction project. A few more days of steel work assembling the actual rails on top of what John has installed over the last two weeks and we can call in the roofing crew, headed by our good friend Gary. If you remember, Gary fabricated the roof structure in several sections in his driveway last July. Once the rails are in, he will bring in a crew of about four workers and spend no more than two days assembling the roof in place. Hopefully, that will occur in the next two months.

Have a great Holiday Season!

November 5, 2010

I know, its been a while since the last post - almost 3 months! Construction has slowed down for several reasons: I had a busy schedule with my docent volunteer work at Palomar Observatory, our unseasonably heavy rains over the last several weeks have made the dirt road access to the observatory a bit more hazardous than my car can handle (about 3 inches over the past month but ten times the average), plus John has used up all his vacation time for the year. That's the real bottleneck because we are at the stage that a lot of steel fabrication work is necessary and that is John's forte. Nevertheless, work has advanced far enough to justify another blog.

I drove out to the site this past Friday for the day with my new helper - my daughter Kristin, who just moved to Orange county with her husband in mid-October. John arrived about noon but he was staying for the weekend. Together we completed more than we had planned for the day. Fall is a great time in the desert - bright sun, temps near 80, very low humidity, light breezes.


Kristin and I got there about 9 AM as usual and, after touring her around the whole 17 acre site, including the bunk house for the showers and bathroom, I put her to work. She jumped right in and painted the last interior wall to the warm room area:

She finished that up pretty quickly and then she primed the interior walls of the observing area. Since the cinder blocks were so dry from being exposed here so long, it will need a second coat, just like the exterior walls will.

Kristin had all the painting done by the time we broke for lunch.


While she painted I excavated outside around the east rail support column. I thought we were finished with that work but we forgot one thing: we need to use a 40 amp welder and do a number of welds at the top of the rail. For that, we need about a five foot high temporary platform for the equipment and welder when we get to that point. John had previously assembled the platform but we needed about five feet of additional space excavated from the hill side around the rail support columns. I completed the west side excavation back in August and John started the east side a couple of weeks ago. My job was to finish that off. I spent most of the day moving 11 wheel barrels of stuff from that point to the head of our driveway about 30 yards away. The fun part - right! - was digging out a large chaparral bush also. While digging I hit a large underground burrow - fortunately, it was empty.


Here I am fighting with the chaparral bush. John has been doing a lot of steel fabrication over the last couple of months. Here is some of the work he has done:

Top of the west wall showing 3 steel pieces that are anchored thru the wall with steel bolts. They will position the horizontal steel beams that will support the rails.

This is a very complicated piece:


This is the corner brace for the southwest corner. What is not visible are the two vertical tabs extending down the outside just like the two visible on the inside. Again, steel bolts extend thru the cinder block wall and the vertical tabs. This picture is 180 degrees from the picture above so you can see there are four positional pieces on the west cinder block wall.

We ended up the day by closely positioning two of the horizontal support rails. These are 18 foot sections of 2 X 6 steel tubing. It doesn't look like a big deal but when you have to squat on the edge of a roof and slide almost 300 pounds of steel into position, it gets a bit tiring very quickly.

This is the west support rail - almost in position. In this shot it needs to slide out a total of four feet beyond the rail support post. It also needs to be laid horizontally rather than vertically. The other end rests on one of the positional supports from the west wall previously pictured above. We were surprised at how little give there is on the middle of the rail, despite not having a support column in place. Despite the fact that this rail will be equally sharing a 4,000 pound roof, we decided it only needs one additional support column above the current warm roof, rather than the two we had originally planned.

That was pretty much everything we got done. Finally here is a shot of John and I standing in the newly excavated area, grinning broadly since we know for sure that all of the excavating is finally complete. Next to us to the left in the shade is the temporary platform that John constructed.

Now a bit of biology. Near the observatory we found a small skull, probably from a rodent. What puzzles us though are the two long fangs that seem to be much larger than the rest of the cranium. If anyone can identify this, please let me know - maybe a snake?
Over the next couple of weeks I hope to complete all of the second coat primer painting in the observatory area and around the exterior of the building. John will continue with the remaining steel fabrication before we have our friend come in with the 40 amp welder for the heavy duty welding.


Next blog I'll show my new deep sky imaging setup, explain what it took to assemble it, and talk about how it works.

August 7 - 9

I headed out to the observatory Friday morning with plans to be back home no later than Sunday. The plans included more observatory construction work with John and enjoying the club Star Party on Saturday night.

The unseasonably cool weather continued through the entire weekend with daytime highs near 90 when 105 to 115 is the norm for August. The bright blue summer sky continued with a light breeze all weekend.

My work goal for Friday continued in support of the roof raising in several weeks. The rail supports in the hillside beyond the north wall were completed several weeks ago but. in anticipation of John;s friend's higher powered welding work coming up, I needed to excavate out the hills side for four feet on either side of each support as well as the entire hillside for another feet beyond the supports. I spent most of the day until dinner time using a jack hammer to break up a lot more granite and moving about 20 to 25 wheel barrels of rock and soil about 25 yards to near the head of our driveway. That was enough to partially fill in the gully that we would fall into with just a small mistake backing out of the driveway. By sunset there were about a dozen people on site setting up their equipment but the sunset was spectacular and was the kickoff to two nights of osberving that I would call magical. The air was so clear that after the sun went down the western sky went from deep blue right through all the rainbow colors, including a bluish green and then a strong green, before turning red near the horizon.

Once it was full night the sky was incredible. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon and everywhere you looked there were stars. The dark galactic clouds that split the summer Milky Way were not only intense but varied in their intensity - a sight that's rarely seen. What made the night so intense was the heavy marine layer that blanketed all the coastal areas. That keeps all the artificial lighting beneath the clouds and the clouds beneath us. The layer was almost 4,000 feet which is unusually thick but the top still over 500 feet below us. A little after 10 PM there was a brilliant fireball overhead, crossing almost half the sky. It was so bright that it cast faint shadows across the ground and the trail lasted for several seconds - wow! As if that wasn't enough, far to the east we could see sheet lightning flashes in a cloudless sky. We found out alter that the origin was thunderstorms around Quartzite, Arizona - that's right - Arizona! Those storms were over 150 miles from us and yet the lightning must have been reflected off something in the upper atmosphere between the storms and us. The flashes were not very bright and stayed low to the horizon. If you have ever seen the old war movies where they showed artillery barrages over the horizon and the flashes that they made, that was what we saw. They lasted till well after I went to sleep about 1 AM. John was imaging all night but he was concerned that the lightning flashes, even faint n and low in the sky, may have interfered with his imaging. He'll know early in the week when he starts processing them at home.

Saturday was a good work day as well as some interesting nature stuff. While John continued on his finishing touches on his observing room, I installed all of the spot lights in the ceiling panels in my control room and our common room. I located four spots with a dimmer switch above my control desk area plus another red spot light just inside our entry door. The red light will be on at night to give enough illumination so that people entering the observatory will see enough not to trip but not ruin their night vision at the same time. Many people have heard of night vision but very few people have actually experienced it. It is simply the adjustment of your eyes dilating to see better at night. That is not something that is achieved by standing in a suburban back yard for a few minutes - your eyes reach their maximum dilation, or optimum night vision, after about thirty minutes in total darkness. I have had many guests come out to the observatory, look at the sky for a few minutes, and think they have seen everything. Then, over the next thirty minutes or so, they ooh and aah a lot more as they begin to see more and more fainter objects.

Now for the nature part. I saw my first tarantula in the wild on the path from the observatory to the bunkhouse. It was just ambling along, sharing the path with me. Including its legs it was about the size of my open hand. To top that off, a bit later in the afternoon as several of us were talking outside the observatory, a very large flying insect buzzed us before moving on. It was almost three inches long and was very strongly black in the front and orange on the back half. I never saw anything like that before but the desert vets said it was a tarantula hawk. Its a beetle that is on of the few living things that preys on tarantulas - parasitic wasp - they actually attack a tarantula in its hole, temporarily immobilizes it , then lays eggs in its living body, where they feed until they hatch. Then we saw a longhorn beetle, about 2 inches long with a pair of feelers as long as its body that protrude straight out of its head perpendicular to its body. That was the nature activity for the weekend. Saturday night was the monthly club star party and, by night fall, there were at least thirty people on site with their telescopes. Since I still don't have my stuff on site and John was prepping his equipment for more imaging, I decided to make the rounds socialize. Its always fun to see who has what equipment, what's new, and what kind of projects beyond sightseeing that others may be doing. I ran into an old friend named Dan who has a pad on the other side of the site and I haven't seen him in almost a year. He proudly showed me his new telescope - a 22 inch home-made Dobsonian. I know that probably doesn't mean anything to most of you. This is a telescope that has a mirror, not a lens, which is twenty-two inches across. That size mirror allows you to see some very faint objects, roughly several million times fainter than the naked eye. The home-made part means that Dan has made the entire telescope himself except for the optics. Dobsonian is the type of mount he uses and is named after a Trappist monk who invented this very simple type of mount over fifty years ago. This mount has made large telescopes for visual observing very inexpensive and available to all serious amateurs. Thirty years ago the largest mirror telescope you could find was about 8 inches; today 16 inches is considered on the small size. Dan's entire telescope weighs 80 pounds, is easily assembled, transports very easily, and is snap to operate. The rest of the night was a repeat of Friday night - down to the sheet lightning on the eastern horizon and a bright fireball overhead. The fireballs from both nights were unusual enough that I filed a Fireball Report on each one with the International Meteor Organisation, a world wide group dedicated to gathering data on meteors and expanding our scientific understanding of them.

Sunday dawned identically to the last two days. John laid down indoor/outdoor carpeting in his control room; I finished all the additional electrical conduits and outlets in my bunk room and the control/common room.

This was quite an exciting weekend with us achieving all of our construction goals as well as having a pair of extraordinary astronomy nights. This Thursday night, the Perseid Meteor Shower peaks and I am trying to make plans to be at the observatory and conduct a night's worht of meteor counts that I can submit to several pro/am groups.

Sorry there were no pictures this time around but photos will be much more interesting once we start on the rail system.

July 22, 2010 - Roof + Palomar

Since I've been writing this blog for just over a year you can understand why I'm now including the year in the title.

Last post I mentioned about the roof sections being completed off site but I had no pictures at that time. My friend Gary has sent them to me so here they are.

These are the frames for the two roof sections:

Both roof frames are stacked in Gary's driveway - yes, that is an orange grove in the background. Each frame is almost 18 feet long. Here is a closer picture from a different angle:The roll-off roof has side walls also, each 18 inches tall:The remaining construction will be done on our site when we complete the rail system over the next month. The truss supports will be individually welded in place as well as the wheels attached to the side wall at that time. The sheet metal surface will be attached once the frame is completed. This method of construction has several advantages. Its easier for Gary to transport his sections to our site in several pieces; completing the frame on site will allow us to correct any possible measurement inaccuracies during assembly before they become fatal; and, assembling it in smaller sections eliminate the need for a crane and will be done by a work crew.

John and I are taking a break from the observatory for the next week. He is completing a kitchen reconstruction and I'm doing volunteer work at Palomar Observatory. Actually, I started last week with the first of three Fridays in a row. Normally we have public tours on weekends; we frequently conduct private tours for groups at any time we have the docents available. For these three Fridays we are doing private tours for a local Boy Scout summer camp. Last Friday my fellow docent and I had a blast. The tours typically last for one hour but the scouts were so receptive that we went on for almost two hours (something we can't do on weekends because of the tight time schedule). The Scouts got a kick out of being able to watch the techncians charging an instrument with liquid nitrogen for that night's work. What made this tour especially rewarding is that all of the scouts - about 20 - have just completed their astronomy merit badges and they are all learning disabled or autistic. Their questions and interest level went far beyond the typical public tour. Even though it was only one tour for the day, it was worth the four hour round trip.

Tomorrow morning I'll be driving to Palomar again but when I finish in the early afternoon I will drive sixty miles around the east end of Palomar Mountain to my observatory (actually only twelve miles if I could fly) and do some electrical work.

June 18 - July 9

This blog is a bit different then the others because it covers over three weeks of work.

I met John at Anza by 9 AM on Friday, 6/18. Once again he came out the evening before and imaged all night - in fact the nights were so nice last weekend that he imaged all night from Thursday thru Sunday - that's almost 24 hours of imaging. Because of the more variable weather back East, many imagers there may take up to an entire year to get that much imaging time. That's why we're out in the high desert.

Even the daytime weather was perfect every weekend day, strong sunshine, temp in the low 80s, very low humidity, light breeze. Our plan for the weekend was to work on the vital steel sections for the rail support system. They are the smaller, more intricate sections that need to be positioned very precisely. With that done, we will be ready for John's friend later in July with the high energy welder for the main rail sections.

The first piece to be fabricated was four feet long with a long outside plate and a shorter inside plate.

This is to be placed on the top of the east wall precisely where the flat top of the observing wall gives way to the sloping shingle roof of the warm room area. This piece needs to be perfectly level because that is where the rail begins to be suspended over the shingle roof and it must be perfectly level with the flat top of the observing area wall and the top of the rail upright. We also made a hole in the shingle roof to have access to the inside wall to attach the inner plate flange. In the image below, we have properly positioned the plate and John is precisely leveling it. Once it was leveled, John drilled the two bolt holes to secure the plate. John's sense of position is amazing. We had previously measured and drilled four bolt holes, two in each side plate. By eye, he was able to drill completely through the cement-filled cinder block and come through the drilled bolt hole on the other side precisely.

We repeated the same procedure on the west wall. That was a bit more difficult because it partly overlapped where John's warm room wall rose above the cinder block wall but that was successful.

Next we went back to the cement footings for the rail supports that we finally back filled the other week. We removed the wooden square on top of each footing that had originally held the four bolts in place. We then fabricated a steel plate to take its place and that would also be the base of the rail support. We hoped to use the chop saw to cut the squares but it did poorly. For some reason it had cut the steel tubes much more easily the other week. We ended up using the Sawzall with a steel cutting blade and that worked well. Then we used a drill press to bore four holes in each plate. When completed we placed them on the footings and they fit perfectly.

We also repeated some measurements now that we have some more steel fabricated. We needed to measure the height for the upright from the footing to where the bottom rail support will be extending from the roof. We had planned on up to a 2 inch shortfall with the upright compared to the actual length - it was 1 3/4 inch. That shortfall is to be accounted for by the bottom plate and its adjusted height above the cement footing.

Once we made that measurement we actually placed the upright in position to confirm the measurement:
Over the next two weeks John worked on strengthening the rail uprights with small side flanges and even bolted the uprights in place. See picture below.

He also fabricated the crosspiece of two parallel bars to secure the two uprights together.
The double bar crosspiece is laying on the ground in this picture. It is 18 feet long and weighs about 300 pounds.

On July 9 I met John at the observatory early for a day of work for me but John, once again, was staying until Sunday to complete more of his control room and possibly the diagonal braces for the rail uprights. The day was nice but the hottest so far - nothing like last year at this time fortunately. The day was partly cloudy, low humidity, and temps in the mid-90s but a nice breeze. One of those days that requires lots of constant drinking water - up to a pint every 30 to 60 minutes.

The first thing we did was raise the double bar to the top of the uprights. The piece weighed close to 300 pounds and is 18 feet long and needed to be raised up almost ten feet. Two of us weren't enough but we were lucky that another member was camped nearby. The three of us took about 30 minutes to raise it in position. We easily raised one end and rested it on the top of the east upright. The double bar fit snugly to either side of the upright.
This is the west upright after the double bar was put in place and clamped. You can see two L-brackets welded to the upright. The inside one is supporting the double bar; the outside one will be supporting a 2 X 8 steel beam on edge and is flush with the upright side. The rail will also extend about five feet beyond the upright.

For the second one, we had to raise the west end to the top of the west upright. To do that we had to hang a bit over the east upright for the proper vertical swing room. Once two of us lifted the west end and held it in a rough position about 4 inches short of the L-bracket on the upright, John started to hammer the east end to nudge it into place. One bar on the west end of the double bar however, had bent inward slightly as a result of the welding done previously. While we continued to hold it in position John attached a reverse clamp to pry the end open slightly, no more than 1/4 inch. Once that was done John continued the hammering and the double bar nudged into position easily. That was a tough ten minutes because two of us had to hold the 300 pound double bar over our heads at almost ten feet until it rested on the L-bracket. Once properly positioned, we secured it with clamps for the next week or two until John's friend comes out with a more powerful welding machine than we currently have.

The two rail uprights and the double bar crosspiece in place with clamps temproarily from the northeast. Palomar Mountain is the blue ridge beyond the osbervatory roof at the horizon.

The uprights and double bar from the north (Note that the Quikrete has not been buried at this point.)

That was the toughest part of the day.

We also worked in my control room. We made some space by removing the 18 sixty pound bags of Quikrete that had been stored there on cinder blocks since last fall. The Quikrete picked up moisture over the winter and turned into solid blocks that we could no longer use. We thought about how to get rid of them and decided to bury them on the hillside above the north wall. We dug a long trench and placed them two high.

Then we back filled the dirt over the Quikrete as well as some dirt from excavating more of the north hillside.The disturbed area where the Quikrete is buried is about a foot higher than the surroundign ground. It is to help to guide any rain runoff from the slope above us away from the observatory and into a swale we dug by the far bushes.

Then we put paneling on the wall facing the control room.

Finally, we ended the day by attaching a handrail by the stairs going up to the observing area and tightening up the treads we built over the winter.Over the next month we plan on completing the rail system on the roof. We had good news from our friend Gary who is building the roof sections off site. He has completed fabricating all the roof sections and is waiting for us to complete the rail system to deliver the sections and assemble them. I should have some pics of these sections in a few days.

June 11 - 13

John and I spent two full days working on the observatory this past weekend plus we had the help of two of John's friends on Saturday to get some of the big steel pieces for the rail system up onto the roof.

I showed up late Friday afternoon, not expecting to get anything done that day but to be able to start almost at sunrise on Saturday. John came out the night before with the intention of imaging but he got clouded out. As it turned out Friday night got clouded out too and by 9 PM we were totally fogged in. It was so dark that if you stepped outside and took only a couple of steps and turned around, you could not see the observatory. A white door light less than fifty feet away did not even make a pale glow - it was completely invisible. We were fortunate because we recently added some things to the place to make it more comfortable. We now have a 36 inch flat screen TV (temporarily until I get a deal on a 46 inch one), a BlueRay player,and a microwave. So we ate popcorn, drank beer, and watched "When Worlds Collide" (one of the few good sci-fi movies from the '50s - and in color) then "2012" before we packed it in. I was able to bunk out in my room which is almost finished, and John slept in his warm room on the observing deck (which is almost completed also). At sunrise the cloud deck was less than several hundred feet up and quite thick, plus it was damp and only in the 50s. As is typical in the desert, within an hour of sunrise the clouds burned off, the sky was blue, the humidity dropped like a stone, but the temps stayed in the mid-70s all day with a light breeze.

Since we had two helpers showing up around 10 AM we were able to work on multiple projects at the same time. John double checked his autocad drawings for the rail and post support measurements while I went to work on what was left of the wood mold on the footings. If you remember, we struggled with that during the winter and decided to back off until the weather got warmer. Here's the east footing and the remaining wood mold:
I was pleasantly surprised because the wood had dried out so much over the winter that I was able to cut it easily and then break it out of the concrete with a sledge hammer. What I thought was going to be a several hour job turned out to be about thirty minutes. When I got the mold off the east pier I found that we had a neighbor:

The only reason I got such a close shot of him was because it was still pretty cool out and his body temperature was down so he could hardly move. Here's a shot of the north side with both footings completed and back filled.
I've just gone to live time now - at 9:26 PM on Monday evening as I'm writing this, we just had an earthquake - house gently swayed for about 15 seconds, pool water is rocking back and forth and almost overflowing - USGS just reported a 5.7 magnitude quake near the Mexican border, 118 miles south-southeast of here.

Okay, back to the important stuff. If your remember from last summer's blogs, I spent a lot of time sanding and priming the steel beams that we inherited from the former owners and were half buried for twenty years. We're finally starting to use them for the rail system. They're in terrific shape but many of the ends are just off being square. Here's a shot of John using a chop saw to even off the edge of one of the pieces that will be the wall cap and the base of the rail: That particular piece is a 2 X 6 about nineteen feet long and weighs around 200 pounds. The four of us managed to lift it and one for the other side up onto the roof. Once it was up on the roof and precisely positioned, we closely adjusted its level and extended it beyond the north roof line and over the west footing. John then hung a line down to where the post will attach to the top of the footing. The picture below shows John and his friend Roger taking some measurements. Derek is on the roof.
The measurement indicated that we were within 1/8 inch of our planned height. The other footing showed the same small difference. We were able to cut our lone 2 X 8 into the right lengths for both posts. Here's John cutting the 2 X 8:
One of the things that we have to do also that sounds minor but takes time is beveling the edges of the steel. That is to allow more contact area for when we butt the beam ends and have to weld them together. In the photo below, both posts are cut and stacked and you can see bright steel on their edges from the bevel grinding that we did. Actual measurement and cutting of the two rail posts were the major goals for the weekend. This gives John the information he needs to cut additional small steel plates and supports over the following, or current, week at home. Here is a picture from a different angle of the rails put in place for the post measurement: While these measurements were going on I was on the observing deck doing the very last of the demolition. We had left the 2 X 6 wood caps on the east and south walls through the winter and now they had to be removed to be able to place the rail system. They were originally bolted to the top of the cinder block wall with the nuts recessed into the 2 X 6. We couldn't figure how they originally screwed the nuts onto the bolts because there was virtually no room to get a socket wrench around the nut. I had to chisel some of the wood away to get enough room to work with. The picture below shows the observing roof area from last summer with all of the steel and wood support we had to remove. Compare that to the following picture taken last Saturday from a soemwhat different angle. You can see that the demo has been completed down to the cinder blocks. The bolts sticking up out of the wall need to be cut and then that wall is ready for the rail. This is also a good picture to show the observing area that I will be using. My area is a bit more than 9 feet wide and 17 1/2 feet long. The permanent pier for my telescope will eventually be about where the red vacuum cleaner is sited.

We had another adventure in desert biology. We took a break about 1 PM for lunch and sat around the front door of the observatory in front of my car. As we were eating, a five foot king snake slithered quickly across our driveway under the trunk of my car - no more than fifteen feet away. I was surprised at how fast it moved - I would not have been able to outrun it. Fortunately for us, the king snake leaves peopel alone and is immune to rattlesnake venom and loves to kill and eat them.

That pretty much wrapped up what we did on Saturday. We showered and went into town for dinner. By the time we got back we were getting pretty achy and tired but John went ahead and set up his equipment and automated it to image all night. I have a problem with working all day and then imaging all night so I just enjoyed the night sky for a while. It was a beautiful night with the summer Milky Way very bright and even some bright gas nebulae visible as well as the dark rift running down the center of the Milky Way. After a while I headed in and watched another '50s sci-fi classic - "Them" - yup, the one with the giant ants - and then went to sleep.

We did get interrupted with an earthquake at about 9 PM - a 4.9 twenty miles to our southeast. Things have gotten pretty active over the last year.

Sunday we got more done but we certainly were not at the pace of the previous day. We mostly policed the area around the observatory. The steel beams were stacked neatly on the south side and the weeds trimmed as shown: Also, we worked on the demo pile on the west side. Recently the town dump changed one of its rules - all wood has to be cut to less than five foot lengths so I spent an hour or so doing that:
After it all got cut and stacked it didn't look so big anymore. Of course we have already made several trips to the dump over the winter plus we would carry some of the small stuff home and dispose of it. This weekend I brought home all of the old hanging ceiling panels. Finally I'll end this blog with the last picture from the weekend - me posing at the north end of the observatory. San Diego is about eighty miles beyond the nearby ridge.