 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 at what we've got. Hey everyone this is Nico from Nebula Photos. My friend Jay Satelano 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 Ackman, Pennsylvania, Sulfis 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. There'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 you'll see happen in a lot of observatories, 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 when the columns were in 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 aligned with the edges of the piers. So 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 setting them in the concrete. Sorry for the noise but as you can see a roll is 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 opening. One of the things that you see in a lot of observatories that are roll-off roofs is the older way of doing rolling which is to have the angle iron sitting on top of 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 that's how you would do the rolling. One of the things about those is 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 Nega 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're 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 Aqua and again Stolfitz they hire people from the Amish community to actually do the construction and if you've ever seen anything that that you know that their history in terms of bond 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 um 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 what 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 um and then at that point they have this remote control 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 to match the concrete pillars that that were already poured and 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 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 the 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 yeah in terms of the wall height what what do you think so other than what you're saying about you know losing sky what 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 um certainly is one aspect of it um you know the 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 so that's helpful one thing I would have thought about possibly I've seen some of those south facing walls that fold down to 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 you maybe you get an hours 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 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 out 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 a 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 visit errata um happens to be one of my most favorite poem um one of the ones that always resonated to me was there's a line down here that says um 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 uh in latin I converted child of the universe to puerre university um which translates in latin to child of the universe and so my image is now that when they come out or all pointing to the observatory named puerre university um so again this was kind of special as well because my wife knew that desert errata was my favorite um kind of thoughts in life and uh one of the things she did once we had the observatory up and running where she got me this uh canvas of desert errata so a nice personal ad and a nice thought from my wife as well so this was 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 of 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 um as you could see he had tons of cool tips like the template for the piers and describing using poles to visualize how high the walls should go uh 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 but 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 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 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 slash nebula photos till next time this has been nico carver nebula photos clear skies