May, 2009

May, 2009 - The Orange County Astronomers have owned 17 acres in the high desert since the early 1980s for the club’s use as a dark sky site, far away from man-made lights. The site is 25 miles east of Temecula, 25 miles south of Palm Springs, and for the astronomically inclined – 12 miles northeast of Palomar Observatory. The factors of distance from artificial lights, an altitude of 4,600 feet, and the steady air that led to Palomar being built nearby, results in one of the top three amateur astronomy sites in California, if not the country.

The club's property is partially developed and is bounded by the three roads seen from the Google aerial photograph below.

Currently the site comprises about 50 leased and free observatory pads, about 12 private observatories, an 8 bed, 2 kitchen, 2 bath bunkhouse, and a club observatory housing the Kuhn telescope, and a 22 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain that was instrumental in making a number of supernovae discoveries. Other observing areas include the “RV Area” and “Last Members In” area.

For almost five years the club has tried to get various approvals for a major grading project of the northwest section of the property to develop more flat area for observatories and pads. Its not evident from the photo but the topography varies by almost 80 feet in that area. John and I have been waiting very patiently that entire time for the project to be approved so we could build our own joint observatory. By last fall the club had completed all county required permits and applications for the grading at a cost of almost $8,000 when the county reclassified our site as commercial despite our continuing non-profit status. New permits and applications that were now required would total almost $30,000 and another several years of volunteer time. The club looked for other options and realized that there were two small areas that were graded more than twenty years ago and was now overgrown but would not need any grading. This was enough space for five observatories.

Since John and I were first on the list we selected the best location in our opinion and it can be seen in the photo with the building outline drawn in.

However, an unexpected second choice appeared in mid-May when a partially built observatory became available. It’s the small building that seems to have a circle over part of it in the aerial photo below.

The story is that two friends began the structure twenty years ago. They did a great job with cinder block walls reinforced with rebar and filled with cement. However, before they could build the dome, one of them got married and his new wife did not want him to have anything to do with astronomy – so the story goes. The project was too big for one person to complete so it sat there unused. Neither owner wanted to sell because they had hopes of someday completing it. By this May they finally decided to sell it. We were interested but there could be some major snags along the way. The club requires that all observatories meet local codes before they will even consider allowing the construction. We doubted if anything like that existed for this structure. If they did not, we would stay with building the brand new observatory which would be a known entity. Also there is a lot of work to re-furbish the old observatory after twenty years.

Meanwhile the club Board was asking us to make a final decision about the new observatory site because the other potential owners of the other sites could not choose theirs' until we made up our minds. We definitely wanted the cinder block observatory because we could see the much greater potential there despite the larger amount of work involved. Fortunately, the original builders of the cinder block observatory did have lots of documents and approvals, including one that was a final approved inspection of the observatory from 1987. More pressure from the Board to make up our minds on the new site but we didn’t want to choose until the Board gave us their approval at a Board meeting that was not scheduled until late July. Seeing how we were standing firm about awaiting the Board, they decided to hold a special Board meeting in mid-June to review our documents and plans for completing the cinder block observatory.