Hi everyone, just thought I'd share this fun little project with you.
While a mate and I are building 2 larger RoR sheds, I thought I'd also build a quickie, large enough to house my little wider field setup with the Skywatcher Star Adventurer GTI mount.
We're a farm here with a few spare IBC tanks laying around, so the brain started chugging...an already sturdy framework, ready to mount insulation and old farm corrugated iron onto! I even have some already scrounged cooler room insulated walls to cut into a roof.
So while we were getting the massive pier foundations of the main 2 obsys poured, I dug out another 50cm3 hole (a bit bigger than that) and hand-bashed 2 6 ft star pickets into said hole for extra reinforcement. Yes that kept me fit that day! Buddy then worked his magic to produce the world's strongest formwork for the base. It's next to a perfectly placed power outlet I had installed and WiFi 30m from house runs great.
Might eventually motorise the roof. Eventually ...
I'd love to see more on this... Good cheap solution that should be easy enough to source...
Im planning on building a mini-observatory for my rig (literally big enough for the rig to fit in - nothing else) I'll run a powerlead to it when I'm going to use it, manually flip the lid up, unpark the scope and start imaging... My main concern is children in the back yard not being able to touch/lean on/pull at anything on the rig - so it's more about creating a safe spot for me to leave the gear set up for multiple night imaging runs more than anything else...
My rig is tiny - the whole thing can be carried in one hand (65mm apo, light weight equatorial fork mount... maybe 18kgs total weight... so its not so much the size, I'd just love to be able to get it aligned really really well, then leave it for a couple of weeks at a time, just flip open a lid and start imaging!