I firstly wish you well on your expeditions Barry - happy hunting. I trust that you'll come back with plenty of photography and stories.
Secondly, I tell you all how lucky I think that I am to be handed the reins to this observatory. Being relatively "handy" myself, I fully appreciate the talent that Barry possesses which allows him to forge ahead and build things like this. From all the projects he's described here on IIS I have nothing but admiration for his workmanship.
I'll be taking the whole building (dome and base) and modifying them only slightly to suit the new location. It needs to be slightly shorter to comply with local council rules here. Other than this, it doesn't require (according to my local PCA compliance consultant) any development consent. It's exempt in his eyes and he'll be recommending this view to the council.
I'll be cutting a 4 meter diameter circular cutout into my little hill in the back yard and pouring a 15cm reinforced circular slab around a 1 cubic meter base for the steel pier. I need to be able to remove the pier if I sell up the house at any point and leave a nice round and flat gazebo area.
When we get a little closer to picking it up from Canberra, I'll decide finally whether it's coming to:
1) My Sydney home, where it'd be used almost daily.
2) My place in Cooma (Omaroo), where it would have far better skies to troll around in at near 1,000m altitude with 360 deg to the horizon... or...
3) Up to Lightning Ridge, to be located on its very own 2,500 sq.m block of land next to the "Black Queen" - my ex parents-in-law's tourist attraction up there. If I really wanted to, I could stop everything I'm doing and commit to a sea change - sell the house and everything else and run the observatory at night, as an attached part of the Black Queen, for my parents' visitors. I'd be a professional astronomer! LOL!
Decisions, decisions...
