October 16 - 17

I just completed my first overnight at Anza in quite a while. My plan was to stay from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. I had two objectives: finish the excavation with John of the second footing for the pier that will support the rails that extend beyond the north end of the observatory and, at night, shake down my new imaging equipment configuration.

I got there about 1 PM with another beautiful day there - temps in the low 90s, very low humidity (less than 10%), light breeze, and a very dark blue sky without a single cloud. John showed up about an hour later and we got the excavation down to about half a foot in two hours. The slow progress was due once again to using a jack hammer to break up the solid rock a few inches below the surface soil. By 4 PM we stopped to wash up and get our equipment set up for a night of imaging or, in my case, equipment shake down.

This was the first time I set up in the new observatory; John set up on his observing pad about 30 yards away. An observing pad is simply a 12 foot by 12 foot concrete slab supplied with electricity, and sometimes a permanent mount aligned with the North Pole. John will be selling the lease to his pad when the observatory is completed, as will I.

I set up all my equipment before it got dark. The night became very dark with the Milky Way being visible from Sagittarius in the south all the way through Cassiopeia in the northeast. One way of quantitatively measuring how dark the sky is is by using a portable photometer called a Sky Quality Meter. It measures how bright the dark part of the sky is directly overhead. The higher the number, the darker the sky plus the scale is logarithmic rather than linear. If you live in a city and can see only a few stars, your reading would be no higher than about 17. If you can just barely make out the Milky Way when its overhead, your number is probably about 19. That's what it is at my house. The darkest measured anywhere on earth is about 23. That's 4 numbers different than at my house but is actually about 40 times darker. A difference of as little as 0.3 can be very easily apparent to the naked eye. Friday night at Anza, that number was 21. Visually, I already mentioned how bright the Milky Way was. There were easily several thousand stars visible and some of the brighter and larger objects were naked eye visible.

With my equipment I had to get several different systems working. With the equatorial mount, a Losmandy G-11, I needed to learn the procedure to align it with the North Pole. This is necessary so that I can take long exposure photos of the sky and not have the stars streak on the image as the earth turns. I needed to get it accurate to within less than 10 minutes of arc - that's less than 1/3 the diameter of the full moon. Surprisingly that was done pretty quickly. The next part was to get the auto guider system to work. That is made up of a small refractor telescope piggybacked on my main telescope, with a small camera that is linked to a program on my laptop computer as well as the G-11 mount. What this system actually does is to take a picture of a specific star every 2 seconds, the software then determines how much it has moved over the two seconds, and then signals the telescope mount to correct its movement to accommodate the change. This is necessary because all telescope mounts have some inherent variability that needs to be reduced as far as possible to have pinpoint stars when you image. In this case I got the software to talk to the camera but it could not recognize the mount. That's something to work on for next time. My main system I use for imaging is a refractor with a 4 inch diameter lens and an old Canon Rebel DSLR camera that has been modified. Another software program will tell the DSLR to take a picture, how long to expose it for, whether to store the image on the camera chip or download to the laptop, and how long to wait between taking pictures, and how many pictures to take. Typically, for one object I will take 60 pictures of 3 minutes each, separated by 12 seconds (the time necessary to transfer the image to the camera chip. In this case the software would not operate the camera as had been advertised so I need to find the correct drivers on the Internet. As a result, I was pretty much done by about 10:30 PM that night with no hope of imaging on Saturday night.

Fortunately a couple of other members came by about that time with a bottle of wine and several cups. I could tell that they must have left an empty bottle somewhere on their journey over to me. They hung around until the bottle was empty and moved on. I actually went to sleep in the warm room shortly thereafter. John has his telescope imaging set up perfected. He sets up by sunset, programs it for the entire night, and then either goes around socializing, visually observing, or going to sleep.

I have found that one rarely sleeps much past sunrise in the desert. John came over and we drove ten miles into Anza for breakfast. Good food, not expensive, and lots of the locals from 80 year old cowboys to the native Cahuilla Indians.

We got back and started on that second hole again, finally finishing it by 1 PM. At that point we decided to map our electrical circuits in the observatory. We have 4 fifteen amp circuit breakers and figured out what circuit currently powers what outlet or light. By about 2 PM I decided to call it a day and head home since I was unable to image Saturday night.

Regarding the observatory, we have several options for the next steps:
1 - John will fabricate a rebar assembly for the two pier footings. Then we will get a 2 bag cement mixer and the necessary cement mix.
2 - I'll get 10 gallons of outdoor paint and mix it with the special additive I found. Its a NASA-developed infrared blocker to be mixed with paint. It blocks 99% of the infrared radiation longer than 1 nanometer. That will deflect most of the heat energy from sunlight and keep the observatory walls cooler during the day so it will not adversely affect our imaging at night. We decided it will be easier to use a roller with this material rather than the power sprayer we were considering.
3 - We will re-design the electrical system as far as possible to meet our needs which are a bit different than the original owners. Once we complete the design, I'll do the re-wiring.
If we go with the pier footings first, we will probably follow that up with the roof fabrication and hold off on 2 and 3 above.

Since I'll be having knee surgery this Wednesday, it will probably be a couple of weeks before I am out there working again.

October 2

After several memorable family events over the last month I made it back to the observatory this past weekend. Although I have been AWOL my friend John was busily working several weekends. He worked on continuing the demolition of the old dome supports, cleared brush for a further twenty feet north of the building, and completed fabricating and installing most of the stairs leading up to the observing area and completed the outside grouting project.
Stairs are completed except for the bottom floor platform.

The day was gorgeous - I think I know why people live there despite the amazing heat of June thru August - the rest of the year is terrific. Saturday was terrific - bright blue sky, 75 degrees, low humidity, and a light cool breeze.

Saturday also marked a milestone - the final demolition was 99% completed with the removal of the last roof eave from the warm room roof. The remaining 1% are the two top plates on the east and west walls which will stay in place until we are actually ready to install the steel rail structure.

Dropped eave on the left next to our debris pile.

Most of the eight hours we worked involved excavation. We have two post holes to dig to support the two posts that will support the rail system that will extend to the north of the building for five feet. As can be seen from the photo below where John has just started to dig below grade after excavating the loose soil, there is a steep five foot slope immediately behind the north wall that we had to excavate through just to get to the observatory floor level. Based on the loose soil that made up the slope we removed, the plan was to dig footings three feet across and up to two feet deep.

John using the jack hammer as he digs below grade

However, once we dug down to grade, the loose soil ended and we reached what is commonly called "desert pavement" - fine grains of rock that have gradually glued together with "desert varnish" over a long period of time. Not even a pick helped to break up this stuff. Fortunately, we had a small jack hammer that we used extensively. John used the jack hammer to break up a few inches of the rock, then I cleared out the loosened rock. Back and forth for hours. By the end of the day we ended up excavating about 15 inches with one hole. Since we were going into solid rock, we decided 15 inches was deep enough for the footing.

Tom using a small jack hammer in hole

We called it a day at that point. Below you can see the near hole only;y had the slope cleared down to grade while the further hole is full excavated. Notice below that we threw much of the cleared rock on top of the slope to serve as a berm to direct any water flow away from the observatory.

The holes don't look like anything much but that was almost 8 hours work by two people with a power tool. Our next step is to complete the second hole next weekend. After that we will either proceed with pouring the footings and erecting the support posts or spray painting the observatory exterior.

August 29

After hearing about heat warnings thru Sunday and the temp hitting 116 at Anza yesterday (Friday), I was ready for another day like several weeks ago. Fortunately, that didn't happen while I was there. I arrived early to get as much done before it got really hot although it already felt like it was in the low 90s. The warm room seems to be pretty well insulated because the temp inside couldn't have been above 75 when I arrived. I got set up with my 4 gallons of paint to complete the day's objective: finish the first coat on the half of the room that I didn't complete last week and apply a second coat to the entire room. I looked around for our little pet lizard - just a local resident about 7 inches long that wouldn't leave when we started to clean the place up. Usually it is on the walls but I didn't see it anywhere. I started up the heavy duty fan we have and then I found where he was. We'll have to find another local lizard.

I was painting by 8:30 AM. Completing the first coat went pretty smoothly and took less than an hour. I drank my pint of water every 20 minutes. Pretty soon the room was as hot as outside since the fan was running to help dry the paint quicker. The second coat went on much easier and quicker than the first. I was done by Noon! I left at that time with the temp climbing past 102 and hitting 112 later in the afternoon. Fortunately, it looks like no additional coats will be necessary although I do have to paint the inch or so of wall down by the floor. The next indoor painting will be when we build the divider to make two separate rooms but that may not occur until after the roof is on.

Second coat looks good. The ceiling panels that need replacing can also be seen.

Looking toward the front door and the electrical panel.

John worked at home today. Last week he took home some small pieces of steel to fabricate the short set of stairs we need going to the observing room.

Instead of four very steep temporary stairs, we will build a permanent steel stair way. The first step will actually be a landing at the observatory door. That will allow us to build three steps instead of four in the same space. The treads will be a nice 11 inches wide instead of the 5 inches shown here.

Here are some additional things we have done or need to complete in the next several weeks. Here are the completed steel we recovered from the debris pile.

More steel will need to be purchased but this was a great start and an unexpected cost saving.

This is one of four heavy braces that helped support the old rail structure. Four of these braces will be removed in the coming weeks.

The south wall is clean from the power washing .The dark marks are the experimental grout filling that John used. It looks successful and John will fill in the remaining eroded areas that can be seen over the next week or so. Hopefully I will power paint the exterior in the next two weeks.

The blue ridge in the distance is Palomar Mountain, about 12 miles away. Just beyond and below the ridge line is Palomar Observatory.

August 23

Now that the warm room walls were cleaned, I came out on this Sunday to begin painting them. John had been out since Thursday evening doing his imaging as well as working around the observatory. He got quite a bit done. Even after removing the circular steel rail two weeks ago there still was a lot of rail support stuff on top of the wall that needed to be pulled down. John took care of that before I arrived, leaving only a 2X6 cap board on top of the east and west walls that will remain there until we’re ready to set comparable steel beams in their place. After three days he was pretty beat and headed home just as I started to paint.

We’re using a very light blue semi-gloss. I did all the normal taping and edge trimming and realized quickly that two gallons weren’t going to do the job by a long shot. I only completed about half the walls and that’s going to need a second coat. I’ve painted cinder block before but I have never seen paint soak in like this. I would put a nice heavy coat on the cinder block that covered everything. Over the next 20 seconds or so I could hear these crackling sounds as the paint got sucked into the pores and holes of the block. I was out of paint in two hours and could have finished easily if I had enough paint. I think I’ll need 2 gallons to complete the first coat and another 2 gallons for the entire second coat – I hope.

Two views of the partially painted warm room

The steel dome rail system can be seen on top of the cinder block wall when we took possession in June

Only a 2X6 cap piece of wood is left of the original rail system.

Thank you for being patient as I’ve published several entries a day. I started this blog about three weeks ago and had to do a lot to catch up and you may have suffered with some unusual verb tenses and switching them back and forth – I know I did. I had to go back on notes and emails and remembrances with John about exactly what we did and when we did it. From the next point on I will be current with the observatory progress and probably will talk a bit more about my plans.

August 8

Today we wanted to complete cleaning the warm room. Although empty since mid-June, the room was kind of grungy. The walls had weep marks on them and blown dust and the floor was pretty caked with dust that became thin mud at one time and dried. We needed a place to cool off and relax during our work breaks and we were getting tired of sitting under only the canopy with a big block building next to us.

We had to make sure we had the equipment we needed. Getting a power washer wasn’t a big deal; getting 400 feet of water hose was. Last weekend I paced off the distance from the nearest water tap at the club’s main observatory and determined it was about 380 feet. This week I managed to borrow both a power washer and 400 feet of water hose. The hose was on a large portable spool that was pretty heavy so I drove it to the club observatory. John and I hooked it up and unwound it back to our observatory, following the same foot paths that I had paced off the week before. We ran out of hose at the head of our driveway, about 50 feet short. This is the time you start scratching your head. As it turned out, the people who loaned me the hose shorted me fifty feet.

We searched several of the storage sheds on site that we have common access to and found all sorts of gardening equipment except a hose. Then we tried to run the hose straight thru all the brush. That was a big sweaty effort that we were very careful, watching out for rattlesnakes, but we still were about 25 feet short. Time for a road trip! We had to drive into the bustling metropolis of Anza and find a hardware store. Anza is kind of a throwback place that is slowly changing. The last time I was there the main street had one lane each way even though it is a state highway, plus there were hitching posts! That’s right – like in horses! Stand in the middle of town and you can see at least a mile in each direction and see 20 structures and maybe a car or two on the road. Now its been upgraded to a two lane highway thru town, still only a car or two, but no hitching posts.

We picked up two 50 foot lengths of hose and got back to the observatory by about noon. We cranked up the power washer and I started. We did the walls pretty quick and went on to the floor. The grime came loose very quickly but I got my socks and sneakers pretty soaked thru. John got the wet vac out and started sopping up the water and also turned on a powerful fan to blow out the room. Only took about an hour including vacuuming up all the freestanding water.

Warm room after power washing floor and walls

We took a break for lunch while waiting for John’s good friend Tony to visit from Rancho Cucamonga to see what our place looks like. Having three high amp usage pieces of equipment on at one time without blowing a circuit gave us some added co

nfidence about our electric supply. Tony ended up stuck in traffic so, since the warm room was power washed so fast, we decided to tackle the outside walls. That was no problem at all and it took maybe an hour and a half so we were ahead of schedule because we thought the outside walls would take another weekend. The soil here is so dry that despite all the water that we used for an hour and a half, there was not only no pooling by the foot of the walls, but the soil was just dark from the dampness.

Outside walls after power washing. Lower block surface erosion extends to floor level of observing room and will be repaired

Tony finally showed up and after a short tour ended by 2:30 and the weather was not too hot, we decided to tackle the 18 foot diameter steel rail and its supports on top of the observing area walls. Tony and I were the brute force and John was the cutter. John cut the rail into four equal pieces as well as several layers of plywood that were part of its support. Since the pieces were shaped like triangles but with the hypotenuse curved inward and they weighed several hundred pounds each, we had to be very careful about slowly pushing each piece to the edge of the wall, then quickly shoving it over, and getting it out of the way as it fell off and it swung up in the air. We were done by about 4:30 and were quite surprised at all that we did. We were pretty tired and silly by that time so we took some pics of the day’s work in a comical light.
John and I pointing that we moved the rails from the top of the wall to the pile on the ground




Tony giving me Last rites as I'm pinned beneath a piece of rail structure



Tony giving John CPR while he's pinned also



Now we also have an even larger debris pile that we have to move soon:
Summing up, we had a slow start to the day with the shortage on the hose, but we not only achieved the day’s plan of power washing the warm room, but we also washed the whole outside and took down the steel rail ring. Not bad for a day’s work.

Just as a follow-up, by the next day my feet were covered in over a hundred bites. The diagnosis on Tuesday were sand flea bites. John didn't get a single one. I guess I stirred them up and then drowned them with the power washing.

July 25

The weather finally eased up at Anza this weekend. This time it was almost 20 degrees cooler than last week, being only in the mid-80s but the humidity was still in single digits. There was a chance of thunderstorms and I kept my eye on a line of cumulus building throughout the day 20 miles east of me in the Coachella Valley where Palm Springs is. There was a nice cool outflow blowing from them all day. I started sanding and painting the nine, 18 foot long, 1X1s by about 9 AM and surprisingly completely finished them by 12:30 PM.

I had two curious visitors stop by to see how we're doing, both of them club members out for the weekend. Jim Hannum (whom I met for the first time today) owns the home at the top of the hill with two other club members. Their joint observatory is larger than their house. It houses four large telescopes and they are building another telescope that has a mirror diameter of 36 inches. He offered us some help in that they have a 14 foot open trailer that we can now use anytime to truck stuff to the Anza dump. We are starting to generate a considerable construction debris pile that we will have to truck out in the next few weeks.

Rick Wiggins stopped by a bit later. He has a completely remote controlled observatory on site. I found out he has quite a background in remote control. His current Anza observatory is the third one of his own that he has built. He has also helped Russ Croman and others build some of the remote control telescope businesses in New Mexico, including around Cloudcroft. Just in general conversation today, he has already saved us from making some errors. We were going to control the scopes with Bluetooth from our control desks so we wouldn't need to lay any wire - he said forget Bluetooth - there's too much interference and its too unstable for our purposes. He can show us how to run just one line from each scope to the control desk - that will be for all telescope functions as well as the webcams to observe the equipment. He suggested re-considering the warm room set-ups. Rick said that he is always using white light in his warm room - never red light! If that's the case, John doesn't need a separate warm room in the observing area but can use the main warm room. Rick suggested using what would have been Phil's room as a common bunk room.

John and I will have to consider these things. Fortunately, we have some time for that because the roof comes first. Rick said he would be happy to provide whatever expertise and time we need from him to get our place up and running remotely - wow! He's so generous because he says that he very much likes to help amateurs who are serious about the hobby.

I haven't said much to this point about exactly what I'm going to do with this observatory when its done. I have been interested in astronomy since I was a kid. Other than a short period in the '70s when I did visual observing with a 6 inch reflector, I was basically an arm chair astronomer until '95 when I joined the New Jersey Astronomical Association, of which I am still a long distance member. After moving to Southern California I became interested in astro photography, mainly because I started to wear bifocals and it became very hard for me to look through an eyepiece with my glasses on so I thought that imaging would be a good substitute. By 2004 I was imaging with a DSLR and a small 4 inch refract or on a mount that followed the sky. I frequently came out to this Anza club site for overnight trips on the weekend to do imaging. Its a great spot being far from city lights, at over 4600feet altitude, and very still skies. However, the downside is that the days can be extremely hot in summer, there can be snow in winter, and lots of varmints: scorpions, rattlers, coyotes, and rare mountain lions. Its pretty scary when you are out there alone at night looking at your computer screen and you can hear things moving out beyond your field of vision.

I have also become interested in what is called photometry. That's the measurement of slight changes in the amount of light that an object gives off. Some stars change brightness, asteroid rotation rates can be measured, other stars can explode, yet other stars are multiple and information can be learned by measuring their changing brightness. There is a lot of possibilities for real scientific research with amateur equipment. I'll write more about this anotehr time.

July 18

This is the day we will remember. All week the weather service was declaring an excessive heat warning for the desert areas. We decided to try to work for three reasons: 1 – we thought we had learned to pace ourselves and hydrate well (last weekend was a lesson learned) – remember Nietzsche: “That which does not kill, strengthens” or was that Conan the Barbarian? No, Conan said, “Do you want to live forever?” , 2 – we want the roof up by Thanksgiving which means we need to start roof construction by Labor Day, and 3 - this was the club’s annual Starbecue, a barbecue just before sunset so we get heavy and listless and our greasy fingers muck up our telescope lenses and mirrors.

I got started on sanding the 2X4 steel beams and John worked on ripping an internal wall out in the warm room that we didn’t want as well as unearthing about 500 pounds of concrete that was dumped just outside our front door during the original construction.

2X4s prior to sanding and painting

As we’re working we’re both realizing that this is by far the hottest day we’ve experienced. There were more than 20 people on site by early afternoon and all but John and I, plus one other were in AC somewhere. That one other guy was about 30 yards from me and was partially insane. He was wearing heavy, dark blue, full length jeans, a black shirt, and just a small hat; plus he was on his hands and knees cutting 5 foot high brush with a pair of hand clippers! A bit later another guy Sammy is calling and waving to me from about where that guy was. I went over and there’s the clipper guy, jabbering away incoherently and half-conscious in the brush. I helped Sammy load him into a car and he drove the guy down to the bunkhouse. Other people there got him in front of an AC unit and got him into some ice for several hours. If Sammy hadn’t walked from the bunk house to his car and passed by this guy, he probably would have died because no one could see him on the ground. I was actually the closest one. By the time I got back to the observatory, John was taking a break inside so I joined him. When I entered I felt like I just walked into an AC room. I said so and he started laughing and showed me the thermometer – it was 99 inside!

Diligently sanding somewhere beyond 110 degrees

With that example, let me talk about the weather. First of all, the US Weather Bureau station in Anza about 5 miles east of us reported a high of 111 for the day; a local private weather station about 5 miles south of us reported a high of 118. I can tell you that with those temperatures, there is no way that you can accidentally work too fast or drink too little. A couple other unusual weather events. Several dust devils blew through our site early in the day. One I didn’t see while I was sanding until I got a mouthful of dust and sage brush. It started to lift our canopy despite having six cinder blocks holding it down until John and I jumped onto the posts. We also had a light shower around noon time from some clouds I thought were 15 miles away - rain at 110 degrees! We quit about 4 PM after about 7 hours – about the longest day we put in thus far.

By the way, clipper guy apparently felt better by that time but was still insane because right after we quit, he came back out and started his whole thing all over again – including passing out.

We hung around for the barbecue that started around 6 in the shadow of the main observatory. Nice food spread and about 50 people enjoying the seemingly pleasant 100 degree temp. However, I can’t understand how people can eat hot food in such heat.

Despite the extreme heat, neither John nor I had any problems at all working with those temps. Slow movement, lots of cold water regularly, and protect yourself from the intense sun.