Dave's Observatory

My students have an open invitation to come use my observatory.  Summer nights are best because it gets windy at 8000 feet in Colorado during the winter.  The winter cold is fine (I like snow, remember?), but winds stir up the atmosphere and blur the view.  You'll need to stay up late because it's not dark enough until 10:00ish, but of course many of you complain about my crazy-early 11:00am classes.  So call it a wild hunch, but I'm guessing that 10:00pm should work ok.

I built the observatory as a cozy building to try to minimize impacts on my mountain views. It's sufficient for one, and crowded with three, so small groups are best.  The observatory has a rotating dome (assembled from parts pre-cast by Technical Innovations).  Inside, I have a Tele Vue NP101 refractor piggy-backed on a TEC MC250 (10") Maksutov-Cassegrain.  Both live on a very nice Parallax HD150 mount (see my review of this mount).  The mount is on top of a 14 inch diameter concrete pier that is completely isolated from the observatory building to minimize vibrations.  The pier extends 6 feet underground (boy was that an adventure to dig -- it's the Rocky Mountains) and required 6 tons of cement.  Why so overkill?  Any vibrations can ruin long-exposure photographs taken through the telescopes, and concrete dampens vibrations much better than metal poles which can ring like a bell.

A few visitors have been shocked to discover that the observatory isn't heated.  Unfortunately, if you want to see anything at all, that's a horrible idea.  Imagine that you carry a large telescope outside from a house that's heated to 65 degrees.  Even if the outside air is a pleasant 50 degrees, the thick glass optics on a 10 inch telescope can take hours to cool down to ambient temperature.  In the mean time, air currents boil around inside of the telescope tube and wreck the view.  It's like a pot of water on the stove; as the bottom gets heated, you can see the water slowly churning around and transferring the heat to the top.  Similarly the part of the telescope that points at the sky cools down first, so air currents swim around and transfer heat from the bottom to the top.  Building an unheated observatory minimizes this problem by keeping the telescopes at the outside ambient temperature. 

I built the observatory to get the most out of my "almost-dark" skies.  Dark skies are the holy grail of an amateur astronomer, but every year Denver's light pollution intrudes more and more on my mountain site.  If you think about it, that's a huge waste of energy.  Why should Denver pay to light up my house which is an hour away?   The problem is primarily Denver's outside lighting fixtures that shine up and sideways as well down.  The solution?  Install reflective shields that shine the light down where it is needed; as a green environmental bonus, this effectively cuts the energy needed in half.  So save money.  Make an astronomer happy.

If you're curious you can check out some images taken at my observatory.

Please contact me directly with any questions, comments, revisions, corrections, rants, or raves.

Contact:  David Bahr at dbahr at regis.edu