I haven't written about the observatory plans in a while. Several things have come up which delayed a start on construction, but I'm getting back to it now.
What will this observatory be used for? I had to consider what I wanted to get out of this before I could really get in to designing it. One thing I knew from the start was that I wanted to plan for making it completely remotely controlled and eventually totally robotic. A good fraction of clear skies come in the mornings here when I'm asleep and I wanted to take advantage of those. My "day job" as a Staff Astronomer means I have a pretty variable sleeping schedule, but instead of this making it easier for me to justify staying up all night, it makes me cherish the times when I can get a full night's sleep.
The next question is whether I want to accomodate eyepiece viewing. This actually has a big impact on the footprint of the observatory. If the goal is imaging only, then the enclosure has to be big enough to contain the swing area of the mount and telescope with a camera attached. If you want a human in there looking through an eyepiece, you need additional room on all sides for them to walk and also for an observing chair to fit so they can get to the eyepiece comfortably.
I had initially decided that the goal was remote or robotic imaging only with no eyepiece viewing no accommodations for an observer. I've done some astrophotography in the past, but always by taking my gear out to a dark site. This really limited how much imaging I did though. Much of my time under dark skies involved tweaking and troubleshooting equipment that was set up and taken down each night, so new issues seemed to crop up all the time. I eventually decided that to do imaging well, I really needed a permanent setup and I put those activities on hold.
I got close to breaking ground on a small (7 foot square) imaging-only observatory before some conversations with other observatory owners and some more thinking made me decide to go with something bigger. I still expect that I will primarily use this with a camera on the telescope, but I'd like the option of doing eyepiece observing. In addition, having room for a person around the telescope makes any installation and troubleshooting of equipment easier and it means I'll have plenty of room to grow.
I also think I'll take more advantage of the skies here at home if I can do eyepiece observing at a moment's notice. Without the overhead of setup time, I think I'll do a bit more planetary and lunar observing when it isn't new moon as well.
I'm still not sure how much "pretty picture" imaging I'll end up doing. I really enjoy the data collection aspects of imaging and I do enjoy working with the equipment. I haven't found the image processing very satisfying though. It seems that the really good imagers out there get a lot of satisfaction out of the processing steps to take the reduced data and make a really aesthetically beautiful image. I'm not sure I have the skills or patience to do that sort of image processing.
Fortunately, there is a whole other area where having this observatory does interest me a great deal and that is for science. Just doing some straightforward photometric monitoring projects would be interesting. I'm also intrigued by a new class of detectors based on InGaS which are starting to come down in price. These detectors are sensitive in the near-infrared out to a wavelength of almost 1.5 microns. At the moment, they are too expensive, but in the future I hope to be able to do near-IR photometry which is a field that is not crowded right now due to the technical challenges.
Finally, I'd love to be able to do some spectroscopic monitoring projects. Most of the observations at the observatory where I work are spectroscopic measurements and it is still only a small subset of amateur astronomers who are exploring this -- though there are growing numbers of them and there are now several commercially available spectrographs for amateurs. Once the observatory is in place and operational, I hope to buy a spectrograph and add a scope dedicated to spectroscopy.
Update
One quick update on actual progress on building the observatory: I've just received a shipment of lumber and other building materials, so things should start moving quickly now. More to come in future articles.
Lumber to start the observatory build arrives and is stacked in my garage.