Day 1: installing the Pulsar 2.7m dome

 July 11th... I have received the Pulsar dome (2.7m) for couple of weeks now as well as the wood for the garden house couple of days earlier. Tony H. & Christophe P. joined us (my wife, our 3 kids & I) to assemble the observatory in our garden.


Initial sketches

Above are some initial sketches of the planned observatory. It is made of two parts:
-a Pulsar 2.7m dome (http://www.pulsarobservatories.com/), motorized and controled by Shelyak Instruments Dome Tracker (http://www.shelyak.com/). Inside is planned my 10 years old Losmandy Titan mount & Celestron 11 inches telescope; primary used will be spectroscopy and some visual observing
-a garden wood house to be used as control room during the nights


11th of july

And a small animation (thanks Rachel!) of the assembling day:

Some critical comments

-normally you start assembling the dome then the walls but because I had the large flat surface, it didn't matter.
-be very carefull when assembling the wall that is is round. We put a first fiwing screw on the councrete and use it as a pivot; we ensured the circular shape and marked the other fiwing locations on the ground then pivoted the base to drill the holes and put the fixing mounting. We pivoted back to the circular shape and fixed the walls securely.
-the dome is very very heavy, need at least 4 people to carry/assemble on top of the walls!
-lot was preassembled so it took us less than 4 hours to assemble the overall dome.
-when assembling the walls or dome parts together, make sure to put lot of silicone; I may have put not enough (waiting for the first rain to check!).
-on the dome, adjust the screws and enlarge the hols at some places to ensure a good match between sections; make sure the internal bottom part is well aligned as this is where the wheel will rotate the dome so it has to always be in good contact.


End of Day 1
We started the assembly of the control room:
-Manufacturer: Solid (http://www.solid.eu/) in Belgium
-model: Sarthe (2.7x2.1m inside, 28cm wall thickness)
-options: wooden floor, additional tiles

The wall and the wooden roof took about 4h to assemble, fairly fast for the wall but longuer for the roof!