i'm just going to push the garage door button opener and we'll watch the roof roll off
and we can go inside and take a look what we've got hey everyone this is Nico from nebula photos
my friend Jay Sottolano has recently built his dream roll-off roof observatory in his yard in
rural Pennsylvania. Jay was kind enough to invite me over for an observatory tour to explain its
design and i'm sharing that experience here on youtube in the hopes that it helps others with
their home observatory builds what you're looking at is kind of a ready-made observatory there is a
company down in Atglen Pennsylvania, Stoltzfus is the name of the company mine was the first that
they had ever done by actually adding a warm room onto it so we actually went through the
design phase with them to add the warm room to the observatory itself we walked about talking
about how we were going to do two piers each of the piers is isolated from the original floor
that was poured the concrete floor that was poured there's about an inch spacing between the piers
any of the wiring that runs through is all encased in a plastic housing so that
if any critters get in there they won't be chewing through cables hopefully it's an interesting story
about how we did the piers themselves as far as those bolts that you see sticking up
instead of just using the standard j-hooks that that you'll see happen in a lot of observatories
well one of the contractors was also a welder and so what he did was he actually used those threaded
rods built a cage with rebar and those went down almost two feet and we sank that into the concrete
this is one of the actual forms that i used to do that pier pardon the scratch outs and so forth but
what we did was my wife and i came out at night before anything was poured just that when the
columns were in um and we marked out where north was going to be and where south was going to be
we put notches so that we could see and those notches align with the edges of the piers so
on the piers on the outside of the piers we put where north and south was we put levelers in there
and then when the time came we attached this to the cage we sank it down into the cement
aligned north and south and that's how we pretty much got everything level and pretty
much lined up with north and south to begin with and so these became really invaluable
to working with the piers and and setting them in the concrete sorry for the noise
but as you can see it rolls pretty smooth even at three or four o'clock in the morning
i haven't gotten any complaints from the neighbors as far as the roof closing or over
one of the things that you see in a lot of observatories that are roll off roofs is the is
the the old older way of doing uh rolling right which is to have the angle iron sitting on top
of the the roof itself or on top of the building itself and then you would have those large three
or four inch rollers that have the indentation and and that's how you would do the rolling um one
of the things about those is it it can be really really hard if one of those wheels tends to go bad
or one of those wheels locks up it becomes really difficult to try and change that out fairly easily
one of the things about this is these are garage door opener wheels each wheel can hold about 110
pounds there's 22 on each side for this roof the roof weighs about six to seven hundred pounds
so the beauty is if a wheel goes bad as you can see underneath there's only a couple of screws
that are holding it in place and i can drop that whole wheel assembly out replace it with one of
these that that Nico was just filming put it in and i'm back in business and really the only out
time that i've got is how long it takes me to take a few screws out of the top and then like i said
you put in the new wheel if one of them happens to get a little bit tied up so again something you
think about as you think about how would i improve upon things right how would i work with things um
what you're looking at is the construction that they used it's actually built
by the amish community the company again that that works out of Atglen. They hire people from the
amish community to actually do the construction and if you you've ever seen anything that that you
know their history in terms of barn raisings and so forth they are excellent excellent carpenters
and so they bring that trade into building this the company itself did a lot of this with
storage sheds that's what they were their primary business was um but they branched out now into
these observatories and have really really come a long way we have people i've had people here
to look at the observatory who are considering one for themselves from maryland from maine
from other areas that um that would just want to see before they actually you know purchase one
what's one of the ones that looks like when it comes out um they deliver all over the northeast
they do um and um i have some videos i'm not sure if Nico's going to include them or some pictures
it was an amazing delivery um the floor was already poured the concrete pillars the bases
were already in before the building actually came and the building comes off of a truck
and then at that point they have this remote controlled radio control whatever you want to
call it forklift and they are actually able to roll the entire building make adjustments
as much as like a sixteenth of an inch with this huge building sitting over the floor
that's been poured and over the concrete pillars as you can see that were already in the ground and
so the holes that were cut at the factory how well they aligned those holes up uh to match
the concrete pillars that were already poured in the ground that was that was the part that amazed
me is that the entire building rolled over the top of those and was set down perfectly in place
so you mentioned you've you know you've seen friends observatories you've thought a lot
about this over the years so you've already put in a lot of like collected wisdom into this design is
there anything that's been unexpected that you you know you regret or anything that's come up
we tried to do as much you know as possible you see the you see the tree line around you know and
you and i talked about this a little bit offline um my wife and i actually came out and we used
poles right that we cut to height of where we knew the roof was going to be so that i could
actually see from where the observatory where the mounts were going to be what my line of sight was
going to be to the trees so that's one thing that i don't think people necessarily think about is
line of sight over the top of a roof right um and you need to right because the worst thing to do
is find out that you built the walls too high and you've lost 10 degrees of the sky right in terms
of the wall height what do you think so other than what you're saying about you know losing sky
what do you think the other consideration with wall height is is it is it about comfort more
or is it about wind or is it everything wind yeah um certainly is one of the aspects of it um
you know the higher the wall but not too high the less wind you have i mean you know even with this
little breeze that we've got today right you go inside the observatory and there's nothing i mean
you won't feel it at all so that's helpful one thing i would have thought about possibly i've
seen some of those south facing walls that fall down they give you a little bit more but when
i looked at those and the amount of time that you're actually having that south facing wall
open for imaging you're running into the corner of the building fairly quickly right you know
so maybe you get an hour's worth of acquisition out of it right but it just didn't seem to make
sense to add that much complexity onto that side of the of the building right you know sure um so
again i i think that the best thing to take out of this is is that as you expand the series now um
of different people doing observatories different ways everybody should tune in and see what to pick
at the best for them right whether you build it yourself like we talked about there wasn't
anything here that couldn't be done by myself it's a time cost of money kind of a thing and you know
who's going to help me raise the roof who's going to help me with rafters so on and so forth um
versus having somebody build it and then just roll it right onto your your pad one of the things that
you know that we like to that i like to do is you want to kind of personalize the observatory and
i'm getting to the point now where the walls are partly up and i can start to do that um Desiderata
happens to be one of my most favorite poems one of the ones that always resonated to me was there's a
line down here that says you're a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars
and you have a right to be here and in fact that line child of the universe resonates with me so
much but that's the name of the observatory in latin i converted a child to the universe to Puer
Universi which translates in latin to child of the universe and so my images now that when
they come out are all pointing to the observatory name puerto university um so again this was kind
of special as well because my wife knew that this Desiderata was my favorite um kind of thoughts in
life and one of the things she did once we had the observatory up and running was she got me this uh
canvas of desiderata so a nice personal ad and a nice thought from my wife as well
so this is the second video in a series i'm doing you know obviously touring other people's
observatories and my hope is that eventually i'm going to use all this knowledge that i'm
gathering from other people in designing my own observatory and that's the long-term plan
but jay was amazingly helpful in that as you could see he had tons of cool tips like
the template for the peers and describing using poles to visualize how high the walls should go
considering the tree line just tons of really cool ideas i'd never heard before i think my
biggest takeaway was that i think roll-off roofs are superior to domes at least for me
it actually cleared up a bit the night i was there and being in the observatory completely under
the wide open night sky i just really don't think you can beat that experience
so i'm keeping an open mind where roll off roof is definitely what i'm personally leaning towards
i want to put in a quick plug here at the end for my patreon campaign videos like this one where i'm
traveling to do an observatory tour take time and money to produce so i'm very grateful to everyone
who is able to support me on patreon as it allows me to make videos like this one and in addition to
helping support the channel there are some real benefits for signing up i think we're building
a great community uh now over 700 people over on patreon both through the monthly zoom calls
and on the discord which is like a message board where we do challenges and group projects
and people have really great discussions uh in both places on the zoom and on discord
you know everything related to astrophotography is covered so if you like my videos and you
could pitch in just a few bucks a month i'd truly appreciate it the link is patreon.com
nebula photos until next time this has been Nico Carver Nebula Photos. Clear skies!