Obs Page3


Here's what it looked like with the deck completed. It measures eight feet across, with each outer face being 39.75" wide. The original idea was to build a railing around the deck and house the telescope in a removable 39.75-inch square box, about seven feet tall. When observing, the four sides of the box could then be attached to the outer railing as light/wind shields, positioned to any four of the eight sides as was deemed necessary.	When Peggy saw the deck and then the drawing for the proposed railing and box she felt it just wouldn't fit. So after much thought and negotiation we settled on a small octagonal building with a rotating dome of some sort. With that settled I went about building the walls. The top of the wall is about 40" above the floor level. Note that I left the floor open hoping to encourage airflow through the building to help cool it in the summer. That has worked very well.	The "dome" is somewhat modeled on the building that houses the WYNN telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. The base of the dome can be seen above. It is about 16" in height. The wheels will be attached to the bottom of this ring. A circular track built from 1/2" plywood cut in arcs will be attached to the top of the wall.

The main wheels are 3-inch hard plastic casters attached to sections of 2x3 lumber and bolted to the base of the dome. The plywood track can be seen here, as well as a 1-inch strip of aluminum attached to its inside which provides a surface for retaining wheels to ride upon. There are eight of the main wheels and four of the retaining wheels.	Here is one of the retaining wheels attached to its mounting block. The wheels are 3-inch garage door pulleys and are attached to the mounting blocks with 3/8" bolts.	Here are the finished wheel treatments. Everything works pretty well; I do need to adjust the retaining wheels a bit as it turns out that the octagon that comprises the dome's base is not perfectly octagonal. Still, even without the adjustment the dome turns quite easily.