 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. For many years now it's been my dream to build an observatory in my backyard. Once I started getting serious about this goal I did two things. One, I started touring other people's backyard observatories to ask them questions and try to figure out exactly what I wanted in my own dream observatory. And two, I was renting at the time so I started looking for properties to buy that were both in my price range but also had dark skies. And about a year ago I found this property in rural New Hampshire that I'm living in now and it was near perfect. I really liked the house, the yard, it was a mortal three sky so that's quite dark for the east coast and it was also in my price range and I was luckily the only offer so I was able to buy it. The only problem was a year ago I still had a day job in the Boston area and this house is about two hours away from Boston and I didn't want to make that commute of course that would be four hours of driving every day and I also knew long term I didn't want to pay rent down in Boston and also pay a mortgage up here and own a house I didn't live in. So but the timing worked out such that right around that same time that I bought this house I was making just enough from running this YouTube channel and then the associated Patreon community that I could actually quit my day job as an astronomy librarian in Boston and move up here to New Hampshire full-time. So starting in January I did just that and ever since I've been thinking about this I've been saving and planning for this backyard observatory and and now I'm finally in the position to start building it. To save money on the build I'm doing all the work myself rather than hiring any professionals and I'll be taking you along with me in this build. I'm a complete novice pretty much I mean I'm a little bit handy but I don't I've never built something like this. This is part one of I don't know how many parts probably three or four or five and this is the current state of the project and it may not look like much but it's already been a ton of work enough to make a full video between the two concrete piers including the footers underground this is literally over one ton of concrete that I mixed up and poured myself. 27 of these 80 pound bags of quickcrete went into just these two piers. But let's take a step back starting with how did I pick this spot for the observatory? For my yard it wasn't too hard. My process was I tried astrophotography for many different spots around the yard and by far my favorite was this one for a number of reasons. One is that it's very protected I have the house on one side and the forest on the other which means I barely get any wind in this spot. Another reason I like it is it has the best view in the entire yard to the north and I love the northern constellations like Cepheus and Ursa Minor and Cygnus and things like that and it's still quite good to the south. If I was really prioritizing the south I would put my observatory up on this hill over here but that's much more in the open and then I'd also have to be building on this steep hill which seems like a lot harder as someone who's not particularly experienced in building. Is this location I picked perfectly ideal? No there's always going to be compromises. The biggest issue with this spot is my sky being blocked to the west as the forest starts about 10 meters over there. I can live with that though I'm going to roll off my roof in that direction and it'll it'll work out. Now after I pick this spot as the best place to put my observatory I had a quandary. Very close to my ideal spot was an existing shed that happened to be about the right size for my observatory so I briefly considered trying to retrofit the shed into a roll-off roof observatory by chopping off the roof and adding rollers. After looking at it some more though and also talking to different people including a local architect Timothy Emerson I realized that was just not viable. For one thing the shed didn't have a real foundation it was just sitting on a few cement blocks on the ground and it was not in the best condition. It was over 30 years old the roof was sagging in the middle and I wanted to do isolated piers for the telescope and thinking about it it's much easier to build those first and then build the observatory building around the isolated piers rather than the other way around trying to retrofit them into an existing building. So I decided to demolish this shed because it was going to be too close to where I wanted to put the observatory to have two buildings right there and it would just get in the way. The demolition process went fairly smoothly it was a lot of hard work and it took a little bit longer than expected the main tools I found helpful if you're needing to ever take down a shed yourself are a small pry bar for taking off the roofing shingles a long wrecking bar for getting nailed lumber apart and a cordless drill for taking out any screws that were used and then of course saws for cutting things up the saws I found most useful were my circular saw and then about halfway through I did break down and buy a reciprocating saw because I got tired of using a manual saw for cuts that weren't going to work with the circular saw and the reciprocating saw was especially great when I was taking apart the floor. I rented a truck from Home Depot to haul off some of the debris to my local dump but I also wanted to reuse as much of the shed as I could so one project I took on is I built a dual chambered compost bin with the walls and the doors of the shed that's something I'd already wanted for my garden and I also saved some various scrap wood to make braces for my telescope here but that's jumping ahead a little bit because the next step was actually now that I had the shed demolished was staking out the footprint for the observatory and to do that you need plans. Now I've collected various plans for all of Roof Observatories I had some that my friend Jay Savilano sent me I ordered some from Backyard Observatories out of Ohio and I downloaded some from Skyshed out of Canada and all of these have been super helpful but instead of just going with one off-the-shelf plans I'm going to go a bit more custom and I'm taking ideas from each to incorporate into my design but the the main thing that's been super helpful in designing these plans is my friend Dan Mintz is building an observatory in his backyard at the same time as me and we happen to actually want identical size features we both want you know two pure roll-off roof and so we've been collaborating on all of this and consulting with Timothy Emerson the architect I had on my channel to make sure that we're doing everything the right way and that has been great to have a friend to spitball with who's going through the same thing that's been motivating and time-saving because we can split up some of the work learn from each other's mistakes and all of that as we go so what are we building it's a roll-off roof shed style building it's going to be 10 feet wide by 14 feet long or in metric that's about three by four meters and inside the roll-off roof shed are two concrete telescope piers that are completely isolated from one another and also from the building so to know where to dig the holes for these two isolated telescope piers we have to start by staking out and squaring the footprint of the building and for that all you need is a tape measure some brightly colored string and some wooden stakes you measure out the width and the length and then through the Pythagorean theorem you know the length of the hypotenuse for a right triangle so one half of the rectangle basically and so in this case if everything is squared up in terms of the stakes the hypotenuse should be exactly 206.5 inches so now all I have to do is adjust the stakes until everything is squared up like that in both directions and once that's done I can run string everywhere measure out exactly where the piers should go within the rectangle by again running string I know that they should go straight down the middle of the width so I stretch a string across at five feet in terms of dividing the width and then in the other direction the length I know that they should go 54.75 inches in from the west and east walls respectively so now that I've marked all of that out I have these sort of crosshairs made with the strings and I know exactly where I can start digging I'm using a post hole digger and a long pry bar for loosening up rocks to do this work and you might wonder why I'm not using a motorized auger or a miniskid in talking to Timothy Emerson who is from the New Hampshire area he confirmed my suspicion that augers aren't really an option here because there are just too many large rocks in the soil and so you would just end up beating the auger bit and not really getting anywhere a miniskid would be an option but it's quite a bit more expensive to rent one than just buying these two tools and it means over excavating basically build digging a much wider hole than needed and then having to do a lot of backfilling while the way with manual post hole digging tools I'm going to try to dig is fairly clean straight holes and then simply fill them with concrete so no backfilling necessary and the first hole went very smoothly and in about an hour I dug up a nice straight four foot deep hole about 14 inches in diameter the second hole ended up being a huge time waster about two feet down I ran into this huge rock that was too heavy to lift out I had to expand my hole to about three feet wide to even try to get it out and then I spent a long time easing it up with using these wooden boards and levers and other rocks to keep it from falling back down eventually after a long battle and a little help from Maggie we got it out of there stupid rock but now my hole was much bigger than I wanted I did have a backup plan if I did end up over excavating like this and that was to put a 12 inch sauna tube in the ground and then backfilling and tamping the dirt around it but in the end I didn't use this backup plan because I didn't end up even using this hole at all because at 44 inches deep digging a bit further I ran into a mystery black pipe and I very much didn't expect to run into any pipes in this part of the yard because I thought I knew where my sewer pipe my well pipe my gray water pipe all were I could see where the utilities like electricity and internet were coming into the house above ground from power poles and those are also on the opposite side of the house but I went through some old rather cryptic notes that were left by a previous owner of the house a couple owners back and I found mention of a runoff pipe for the water well so that's what I imagine this is what I ran into and I didn't want to screw that up and the truth is this hole was a mess anyways because of the big boulder so I just filled the entire hole back in that meant I now had to move the footprint of the observatory over about four feet and dig a new second hole luckily that was a super smooth dig everything went really well and I uncovered something fairly interesting I'm not sure what this is but I found it quite deep it came out in one of my last shovelfuls and it looks like some kind of hand forged linked chain of some kind I know this property has been in use for the past 200 years and I've been told this was once the site of a logging operation so if anyone knows based on those scant clues what this might be let me know in the comments the next morning I woke up early to a full day of working with concrete it's my first time really doing anything with concrete so I watched a bunch of videos about how to work with it and I started with exactly the minimum amount of water suggested on the package of this ready mix concrete which was six pints per bag or 2.8 liters and then from there I started slowly adding water until each batch had the right consistency which is sort of like a lumpy oatmeal it will hold its shape if you mold it or squeeze it with a gloved hand but it will still sort of pour although in a fairly kind of splattering kind of way I was initially filling the holes by transferring the concrete from the mixer to a small bucket but since I knew I wanted to get this done in one day and it was taking a long time I started using the messier but faster method of moving the mixer right over the hole and dumping the entire batch in once the holes were about two-thirds full I sunk four foot pieces of rebar and I used these plastic snap pieces they call rebar chairs to connect a few pieces of rebar together I used four pieces per hole and the idea here is they have the rebar sticking out of the concrete footer like this so then when I pour the above ground part the rebar connects the footer and the concrete pier above ground I leveled out the top of the footer I smoothed it out a bit with some cardboard and then I put these 10 inch cardboard tubes on top of the footers the popular brand names for these cardboard forms is Sano tube but mine were from Home Depot and made by the same company that makes the concrete mix which is quick treat of the quick treat it became apparent rather quickly that my system of moving two bags up at a time in the wheel barrel was wasting a lot of time so I decided to make a mess out of my Subaru and use my Subaru to haul the bags from my garage up to the observatory site uh and that that worked a lot better because it was a lot faster for pouring the concrete into the tubes you need the tubes to be braced which just means you need to make a little temporary structure out of wood uh like two by fours and that brace will hold the form securely in place while you pour the concrete into the tube so I used scrap wood from the shed I demolished to make some quick braces just screwing them together really quickly with wood screws and then I was ready to start filling the tubes and this was a lot slower than filling the holes because you have to do it more carefully I used a just a garden spade to do it and a step ladder uh will help of course but it goes pretty quick because there are only 10 inches in diameter so each of my um holes which were 14 inches in diameter took 10 bags each while the 10 inch tubes only took three and a half bags each of concrete mix now when it got close to the top I sunk in my assembled pure plates from Dan's pure plates and I just covered the hardware in plastic wrap and marked with tape how far to sink the j bolts and then I leveled it out using wooden stakes as shims to keep it in place on top of the tube in retrospect this was a bad plan I should have spent more time planning this part of the process it all worked out fine because the pure plates have plenty of adjustment options but I could have made it look aesthetically better if I'd built a wooden template that exceeded the diameter of the tube and then spent time tapping the tube to get the concrete top more smooth uh followed by lots of centering and alignment uh after the pure plates are in you can just cover it all up and wait a few days I covered with plastic trash bags and tarps I waited three full days and then you can uncover make sure everything worked you can try putting your mount on and then you want to peel off the cardboard form after a few days and you should have a super solid telescope pier now if you're eager to use your pier with an actual telescope on it I'd suggest waiting at least one week technically the concrete mix takes 28 days to fully cure but I've read that after seven days it's 90 cured so it's probably safe to use after about a week it's been four days for me now so I still have three more days before I can try mine out fully loaded up I've only put mounts on just to make sure that it all seemed functional uh that I could level everything out and point north that all seemed good so that's where I'm at as of mid-September I've put in my order for lumber at my local lumber yard I hope to get that delivered soon so I can actually start on the building which you basically build from the ground up you start with the foundation so I'm going to be using concrete footers and a gravel pad and then you make the floor on top of your foundation then you add the walls and then the roller tracks and finally the roof this video is sponsored by Squarespace I obviously like having control over the build of my observatory that's part of why I'm doing all the work myself but I also like control over how my photographic work is presented and if you'd like that too I highly suggest setting up a website with your own domain on Squarespace I've done just that on my personal portfolio here and it's super easy to add my new work because of the drag and drop engine on Squarespace I can also make changes to the presentation very easily and intuitively thanks to the flexible but powerful website templates all the features that you would need are included with Squarespace like the commerce feature if you need an online store or a contact form which is spam free I don't get any spam emails just people who actually want to reach out to me so it's all built in all these different features it's ready to go when you need these things so if you're looking for a personal website or a professional portfolio or a website for your small business I think you're going to love Squarespace you can get a free trial today at Squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch use Squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's it for this one thanks for watching till next time clear skies