About Hawks Landing Observatory

Even though the skies in Poway are often hazy, and the marine layer blocks the sky for almost 6 months of the year, my observatory is still a wonderful place to engage with the night time sky.  And them, the Santa Ana winds come in the fall and winter and can often gust to 60+ mph.  With such winds I knew I needed a sturdy observatory.  

I already had a 10' diameter dome, so the building it sat on needed to sustain some3 enormous pressures.  I am limited to a footprint of 120 sq ft. So if the building was a 10' x 12' x 7' tall shed, then I would have 70 sq ft facing the wind or 84 sq ft.  To minimize the wind loading I designed an octagonal building, with each less than 5' wide and a height of 7'.  So the loading was cut roughly by half.  (Yes its a very rough approximation, but it does reduce the loading.)

To further increase the strength of the observatory, I selected 2x6s for the wall framing.  Still interested?  Go see my construction images.

So this is what my control room in my observatory looks like.  Notice the ceiling is insulated and the concrete pier that supports the telescope on the second floor occupies the center.  And for creature comfort, I have an air conditioner built-into the wall and my Onkyo stereo above my desk with Polk Bookcase speakers in the bookshelf above the computer monitor.

From this computer I can control everything that is above me on the observatory desk.  I can control the telescope position, its focus, the main camera and the smaller guide camera.  I can also rotate the camera to frame the object the way I want.  I can also remotely select anyone of 7 different filters.  And finally, the position the telescope is pointing in the sky is superimposed on the images from my All Sky Camera.  This is very cool!  :) 

We are about 300 miles south of Vandenberg  Air Force Base.  Every now and then, we can catch a SpaceX rocket launch - shown at the left.

Contact:  Jim Lawler

And of course, I have several surveillance cameras around the outside of the observatory.