Hey everyone! Nico from Nebula Photos here. I'm here with Alan Midkiff and We are touring his
two home observatories today and so I have a few questions for him and then we're gonna take a tour
of the observatories. So Alan when did you buy this property and were you already into astronomy
and thinking you were going to make observatories on it? Oh Yes actually we bought this property
in 1995. I grew up in the area at Northwest New Jersey when it was quite a bit darker and growing
up I had built smaller observatories but I always wanted to try initially to build an observatory
that was integrated into a house. I have a winch here that I open it with because this this is
where it hangs up and you can see where I shimmed it and jacked it put in replacement wheels as a
second set of wheels and uh, but it just settles on this corner so it's not quite enough I can't
get quite enough overhead push strength to deal with it. So what I do I fix like I said we have
a group up here I just get a bunch of guys to push it, but when I'm here by myself I just winch it.
And that's it that's how we do it now so and like I said initially this had a seven inch
refractor that had a 16 inch uh made reflector then I astrom ordered them in 99 and got put the
25 inch reflector up here actually a buddy of mine who was a photographer he he stuck a Hasselblad in
the corner and tried to get a nice observing with this you can see the 25 inch a little bit here but
I made a mistake as I had one last tweak and I turned I turned the house lights on and screwed
up as exposure but I stuck it there anyway you can see at least you can see a little bit of the
activity if I can do this again back then there wasn't really rails available I had this custom
made a channel you know now you think people use V channels which are probably a better way to do it
um you know the shingles like I said yeah if I was going to re-roof this it would be metal
re-roofing and some point it might need it but now this roof is practically new after the hurricane
in 2012 as is you know half of this roll off I definitely would have used um to get rid of this
sag I would have used at least two by six Rafters okay right the two by fours weren't quite enough
to carry like I said we were working a roof weight single person push-off trade-off versus
um uh movement in the structure so you think that's the reason for the settling is is just
this it's structurally the roof isn't yeah the building seems to be pretty well wrecked I mean
you can see it still slides pretty well I have to go out and service the rails you know uh every
now and then but you know the building is really hasn't moved so much it's just uh you know and
you'll see I've even tried to put like uh angle aluminum you can't see because it's behind the
insulation but there's angle aluminum up there that stabilized it some yeah um but the rafters
really they really drooped a little bit what what are the telescopes you have on the property now to
do some observing So currently on the rooftop there's a 2006 quartz titanium Quest R7 but
Questar so one thing that that I was looking for is you can get these seven inch telescopes now
but they don't have this control box on them the focus there just goes right there but the
control box allows this finder here and it has a built-in Barlow which I never really really
use but I I wanted to have the classic control box on it how does the finder work finder it's if you
look down here oh right it's got a mirror and the light pads just cross and you just I usually put a
probably use the 40 or the 32 plossls on the other Pier is a 1978 four inch unitron and in the field
Observatory is a 2019 I guess if you had to date it uh 50 inch F 3.5 telescope that uh most of
which was made by Norman Fullum of Optiques Fullum but the secondary was manufactured Dream Aerospace
so I went back and forth between roll-off roof and roll-off building and I thought
you know the crowds were getting so big I thought it would be nice just to have
um a telescope fully accessible in the middle of a field and that you know on paper at least
that sounded good and when it when it works it is really nice you just have people mingling around
in retrospect there are a lot of things you have to deal with when you have ground level rails so
initially this was all just Stone and the skirt wasn't here so after the first season 2012 you
know when the stone kept getting kicked up on the rails and the telescope the building was
racking uh closing we put this apron on and then snow would blow under the skirt or so we put the
skirt on that seems to have fixed everything but it requires a little more setup now when
we go to get in this door on the other hand used to be here this used to be the door frame
for the 25 inch to fit the 50 inch in here we had to expand it this way not so much of a problem
but we had to go up on it too and when you have an entire roll-off building and my dad figured
all this out in his head he figured out how to internally frame it because there's no footing
to keep the building constrained so it all has to be internally framed and he did a beautiful
job internally afraid I mean but the 50 inch in here I had to take a Sawzall and cut away a bunch
of that internal framing so that's why you see this it's kind of widening a little bit we ended
up and the other thing is we wanted we wanted it to roll on tracks but not have a big step
that people would trip over but since then we've had to add an outside rail so now it's kind of a
tripping Hazard but it is what it is so you'll see all that when it rolls off out of the way
so to open it now I've got to go outside and take these um I'll take the skirts up and the rail
covers off so that was another thing after the first one is the rail cover so you can see where
we had to put the outside rail here that's an add-on originally I just wanted this little bit of
a step so it wasn't much of a tripping Hazard but now I had to add that on to constrain the wheels
because the building started expanding after we cut it apart and these are those guide Wheels I
was telling you about right here which you where you could easily put a track system and a motor
right run the tractors right along that that base plate and I have a similar one in there one of
the problems that I found is that you know when you you're opening when you're this opens you'll
see it opens under regular rails and uh when you opened it it opens it into a constrained situation
but when you close it the building could rack and twist and the parameter that we had to meet
was that hole right there there's a pin that drives down from that door it has to fit in
that hole so we're targeting that hole so through some trial and error I mean originally we were
pulling the building from here because there was asymmetrical loading it was twisting the building
so that's why I just put this clip here and found the best spot you know where to close
the building to keep from twisting and that ended up being right here
a shackle so um yeah so I'll go I'll pull the skirts up and then uh we'll open it [Music]
so this is this is a beautiful Starlight Xpress three and a half inch focuser but at F 3.5 this
50 inch mirror the light cone is about a little over four inches as it comes through there so it
was vignetting it so in order to fix the problem we had to reposition the mirror I made it I needed
another secondary mirror holder anyway so we we kind of took care of all this at once so
the secondary mirrors is a 18 by 19 and of course it comes back on a 45 degree angle so the mirror
is at about 22 and a half plus or minus and it comes out the side so if you look in here there's
a baffle and you can see that's pretty close to the size of the light cone and that's a little
bit oversized there what's going to go in its place I have a um Harry Siebert maybe a 4.3 inch
diagonal so for visual there'll be a dovetail on here the diagonal will clamp onto it with a
power core and you use it visually for Imaging you'll you'll take it off the dovetail and then
there's a extension tube that goes into a Gemini rotating focuser and that has a clamp that clams
onto a power core and then I have the spacing tube it takes that into a Starlet Express camera
so that'll be so you'll be able to swap them out pretty quick all this stuff here is for the
um all this stuff here is for the yeah this controller here is for the rotating uh focuser
the Gemini and the platform is accurate enough for Imaging oh yeah well we'll see once so this this
telescope has a model so scitec is really good but it's got a model and once you're doing a knit on
it it knows where it is right now the model is not that great because I haven't had a camera on here
so the model is based on this right okay but once I get the real thing done I'll redo the model you
know instead of 11 Stars I'll do 32 whatever but right now this just has an S big camera
and that's what's tied in uh so it's enough now to use visually end for testing once they get the new
system I'll get a real model on it so this here I mean the question is you know would I still do a
roll off building versus a roll-off roof I don't know I think if I had just left an opening that
big here people would have been able to get in and out the problem is that you can see remember that
the time it was the 25 inch it didn't swing quite as wide like if I had a roof here I would have
had to do like a wall maybe this high and this would have had to come down to meet it yeah yeah
otherwise I would never have been able to swing this thing around so like this and that's why
you know if the configuration this might change again which one I'm just gonna on the open deck in
Arizona I'll have a lot of options until I finally figure out you know how it's all going to play out
but uh so you know this is kind of a pain getting having all this crud here the worms come in and
you know I have to clean worms out I don't know why they want to come in here and die but they do
but on the other hand when it's open like this and you have a group it's beautiful especially
when the hay is mowed because then people just are you know hanging around socializing taking
turns climbing the ladder so we're standing by these this big array of solar panels tell
me a little bit about the impetus for doing that so we first built the the first house on
the property the one with the observatory one of my goals was to try to make everything on
this property energy independent that is not reliant on outside sources and the heating
system Heating and Cooling were geothermal which you may or may not know are heavily electric you
know basically pumps and compressors so I want to try to mitigate some of that and see if I
could operate that geothermal off of solar in addition to other normal household loads so in
1999 you can't see it from here but about Midway down we put the first set of panels in it was a
3.6 kilowatt system and that ended up becoming the prototype for the New Jersey rebate program
so we from that time we kept expanding 2002 we added another uh 10 KW and finally through 2010
we we've got it up to 25 KW but now we had a second house so there provides providing the
electricity for both houses on top of that we went and added some evacuated tube hot water
heating panels and that also provides heat in the winter and also domestic hot water
what are you most looking forward to with the 50-inch telescope or astronomy in general in
the next couple years here well we we have a pro uh appropriated some dark sky sites in New Mexico
and Arizona and because things have gotten so much worse here in New Jersey both in terms
of darkness and seeing most of this now is just kind of a setup to get everything ready to move
it down just a matter of choosing which site is more Optimum but they're both pretty nice
sites in Border one Skies well thank you so much for having me Allen and it's been a pleasure to
see your observatories and learn from you today so it's a great time my pleasure too thank you thanks