latitude 34deg 51'South, longitude 148deg 58 East
LSO Facility
LSO consists of a 3m dome on a two-room structure. It is my own design completely. The building is metal framed and covered with 50mm insulated colorbond sheeting. The dome is plywood.
Each room is 3m x 3m. The telescope is mounted on a substantial pier (which also includes a seismometer sensor) and is in the 'cold room'.
Telescope control is in the 'warm room', also 3m x 3m.
The pier is massive, dug down 600mm (to get below the frost line) and 1200mm round and the hole refilled with concrete, rebar and granite.
The above ground portion is 600mm by 1000mm in order to hold an anchored EQ8 pier-pod style mount.
The Cold Room
The core equipment of the LSO consists of the two large scopes and their cameras. The Ultima SCT carries a ZWO monochrome camera and motorised filter set, and the Newt has a OSC Atik. Both cameras are cooled, and report to the computers in the warm room.
The Dome
The 3m (nominal) dome is made of plywood. It is my own design, except for the use of a giant planetary gear for dome rotation. This idea came from EorEquis and the TriStar Observatory build blog.(although in the end he didn't go with a dome at all...)
In designing the dome I made extensive use of Sketch Up. The real numbers matched the design numbers very closely, minimising wastage.
Major components were made of 12mm plywood The rotating section was made of built up sections of 7mm ply and 19mm pine, keeping the mass down and the strength up.
Compared to most 'traditional' wooden domes mine is rotated 90 degrees- where others build with the gores vertical, mine are horizontal. This means that all sections are effectively the same, simplifying design and construction greatly (I've made both styles now so I know!)
The Sketch Up file has been uploaded to the Sketchup 3D Warehouse. Look for "3m wooden astronomical observatory".
The Warm Room (Control Room)
There are two computers in use. One controls the observatory, the other the cameras.
The observatory control computer also has a seismometer attached. This not only gives a good indication of any local disturbances that might affect imaging, it can pick up any magnitude 6 earthquakes within 2000km of my site.
The dome and mount are controlled from the warm room.
Dome control is through the excellent Pierre de Ponthiere's Lesvedomenet software, running through a Velleman VM110N interface control board. Visit Pierre's website at http://www.dppobservatory.net/index.php to find out more about this flexible, manageable solution to automating your observatory.
Mount control is with Cart Du Ceil and ASCOM compliant EQ Mod. A wireless link to a game controller lets me move around and manage things if necessary. Lesvedomenet works in the background, translating EQ Mod instructions to the VM110N board and making things happen to synch the dome rotation to the mount movement.
