Observatory

We built our observatory in 2009 about two hundred feet from our house. We live at Litchfield, a small community on the Bay of Fundy shore, in Nova Scotia. At that time I owned a small sawmill, we cut the logs on our woodlot and sawed the lumber to build and did all the construction ourselves. The 16 inch diameter observatory pier was constructed by loading a 16 inch PVC pipe with re-bar and concrete, bit of an overkill but a nice chunk of pipe from a salmon cage washed up on the beach near our house and was re-purposed.

Celestron CPC 1100

The first piece of equipment to come aboard was the Celestron CPC 1100, an eleven inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. It was fitted with a two inch diagonal and assorted two inch eyepieces. The Orion Q70 series work well with this instrument as well as the Televue Nagler 17mm.

Sky-Watcher ED120mm Doublet

The deck pier is decorated with a Sky-watcher NEQ6 equatorial mount, Sky-watcher 120 x 900 mm doublet retractor and Orion Auto guider package. A small table attaches to the pier for the laptop which runs Starry Night for telescope control, PHD guiding software and Backyard EOS software for camera control. The laptop is also equipped with a long range w-fi adapter connecting it to the router in the warm room ( our house ). The pier laptop connects to the house with Team-viewer software.

Orion ED80mm Carbon Fibre Triplet

Recently a new imaging scope made a home atop the EQ6 mount. It is an 80mm triplet with carbon fibre tube, this scope is fitted with a reducer/flattener decreasing the focal length from 480 mm down to 384 mm.