Tarantula in HOO

A year and a half ago, a plan was made to send two setups under very dark skies to Namibia. After countless conversations, tinkering, planning, purchases, drilling, printing, assembling, connecting and testing, finally the first of the setups arrived at Hakos farm and was commissioned.

For me, the choice of target for first light was obvious — Tarantula. It is an object I had the chance to observe many years ago through a huge 70 cm telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

No self-respecting astronomical observatory can function without an opening roof. Blueberry uses a sliding roof mechanism known as a ‘roll-off’. As a result of analyses, it was decided to discard the idea of installing a dome due to its significant disadvantage, which is the the inability to use more than one telescope. In addition, the circular design makes it difficult to efficiently place additional equipment such as a desk or a cabinet.

Done!

After so many years I finally lived to see it! The base version of the observatory is ready! But let’s take a look at all the steps first.

Floor

Paul has finished the floor extremely quickly. Seemingly a simple thing, but due to the piers the installation of the girders, i.e. the beams on which the floor boards are supported was not trivial at all. The end result looks like this:

Season start

The plan is that 2023 will be the year the observatory achieves what the US Army refers to as IOC - Initial Operational Capability. That’s a fancy way to say lots of stuff still to be done, but the bare bones are there and it’s possible to observe.

Driving system

In my opinion, the most critical part still missing is the roof along with the sliding system. With my ’tackle hardest stuff first’ attitude, that’s what the initial focus should be. Thanks to the help of a local talent mr. Paweł Kulas, it was possible to install the rails on which the roof will move. This was not a trivial task, as each of the 4 rails weighs about 60kg. Together, that’s almost a quarter ton of steel…

Spring

2022 was a special year for me. My daughter turned one year old, and I slowly began to have free time. The construction of the observatory got off the ground, and I was able to continue things that started last year. The condition at the beginning of the season resembled a dump of concrete. A small part of the concrete blocks had been placed in place, but nevertheless the vast majority were scattered in almost random fashion. The situation looked like this:

Another weekend was marked by the continuation of work. This time in addition to Tomek, the senior of the Mrugalski family - Tadeusz - took part in the work. Thanks to his invaluable experience, we managed to solve several problems, significantly pushed forward the construction of the building skeleton. And Tomek learned a few tricks.

Arms and legs, or something about stability.

The built skeleton of the building appears to be stable. When trying to move it by hand, the structure does not bend, not even by millimeters. However, this may be a somewhat illusory impression. During a windstorm, the force generated can be much greater than the capabilities of one man. Here, the not-insignificant force acting from the side, which in the worst case can lead to the deformation of the skeleton into the shape of a parallelogram and ultimately topple the whole building.

Before

The initial state of the contruction was not an optimistic one. Foundation blocks, on which four anchored joists were laid. Plus four corner posts and a few fittings installed. Well, that’s something to start with. Fortunately, this would soon change dramatically. A long weekend was approaching, and I had an ace up my sleeve - my childhood friend Łukasz Kufliński decided to offer me his long weekend and together we would move the construction forward.

The construction finally gotten serious. The excavation is done. Twice. First time using excavator that was doing some heavy ground work on another project. This part was completely unplanned. The excavator operator asked:

Hey Tomek, do you want anything other digging done?

In couple minutes I came up with the location and layout of the observatory. Of course, I thought about this before, but haven’t had anything measured or planned in details. So I eyeballed the whole thing and went with _dig two 1m by 1m by 1m holes here and there". Five minutes later I was a proud owner of two holes in the ground.