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.