 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. So having a structure right here, let's see, 15 feet, we said, let's see, three, two, one, six, nine, 12 feet. Yeah, I mean, this area is raised up, that side is sloped. You know, if we wanna go more than 15 feet this direction, say, you know, 18 feet, you've got plenty of space, I think. Hi everyone, Nico from Nebula Photos. I'm here with Timothy Emerson, who is an architect, and he is going to give me some tips about building my backyard observatory that I have recently gotten some plans for, and I haven't started construction, so it was really great that Timothy reached out to me and offered this consultation because he has a lot of great ideas, and I think this is gonna be really helpful to anyone out there who is considering building their own custom observatory in their backyard. So, Timothy, first, just tell me a little bit about your background as an architect and sort of why you reached out to me. Yeah, so I got into astrophotography about a year and a half ago, and pretty much made all the beginner mistakes by the telescope that was too big, couldn't get them out working, tracking errors, of course, it was the middle of January, so I was really frustrated and cold, so I started watching a lot of videos, I came across your videos and some other people, and they were a lifesaver to me, like learning this hobby. And so, the work that you guys are doing on putting out free YouTube videos, I kind of wanted to give back a little bit, and so I reached out to you, I am an architect, I practice in Massachusetts, a little bit in New Hampshire, then you started doing videos on backyard observatories, I was like, I can definitely help you with that, something I could do, if nothing else, kind of give you my two cents, and maybe show you where you might have some problems. What would you say are the biggest problems that here in New Hampshire, we have to be aware of when building something like this? Yeah, so this is a good point because you've got people all over the country, all over the globe, and everybody has a different environment, right? And that's gonna be the biggest factor in planning your observatory build. Here in New England, we've got everything you could possibly imagine. We've got warm weather, we've got humid weather, we've got cold weather, frost, and having all of those things together makes it pretty challenging. I would say the biggest thing for us would be the wintertime and frost, and the secondary thing to that would be having a very humid environment in the summertime and in the fall, so moisture problems. Do you advise getting air conditioning for an observatory or is it because the roof rolls off, I guess, it's actually I should back up in the style that I wanna build, the roof is gonna roll off, that allows it to really cool off to ambient temperature quite quickly and sort of, but for I guess a lot of the time it's going to be the air will be trapped in there, and I guess also the humidity would be, so how do you go about sort of like dealing with moisture and things like that? Yeah, so having a roof that comes off makes it very tricky, especially a roll off roof, and that your primary issues are gonna be where the roof is connected to the walls where the roller bearings are gonna be. There's really no way to air seal something like that. Some people in like a prefabricated kind of insulated enclosure with maybe a pop-up roof or something like that where it's got a nice gasket that seals around, something like that would be worth dehumidifying in the summertime, but something like this, you know, air wants to be an equilibrium, right? So if we create this nice sealed box and try to dehumidify, or let's say we create this box and it's not quite sealed and we start to dehumidifying it, well we're gonna take the humid air that's in there, but that will force the air that's outside to drive inside the building. So you're really kind of not doing anything by trying to dehumidify a structure like this. So what I would recommend is actually make sure that there's a way of natural ventilation, right? So, you know, this is not a structure that you wanna be heated anyway. So, you know, in the summertime we wanna keep the humid air out. So, you know, a fan towards the gable end and at the bottom we can have some louvers to kind of pull in fresh air and get the air moving. If we can get the air moving, we're less likely to have condensation. So one thing I've seen is, you have an intake fan and an outtake fan or something like that and that maybe will move the air across the top but I've never heard about this louvers towards the bottom. Can you explain that a little? Yeah, so in a structure like this up towards the top the air is gonna be the warmest, right? Because the warm air is gonna rise. So the idea of having the louvers at the bottom is you're bringing cool air in. Now, this glass is a perfect example here in our humid climate. We've got condensation here. So the air around us has moisture in it, right? This water here didn't come from the inside of the glass, right? So we've got this warm air which can hold a lot of moisture and cold air has less moisture in it. So as soon as the air comes in contact with the glass it cools the air off and the moisture falls out of the air, right? So if we can put the louver, if we put the fan at the top we're pulling the warm humid air out and we're bringing in cooler, less moist air at the bottom. And what is a louver? A louver would be like a screen, right? It usually has metal fins on it. So when you've got driving rain it kind of protects the opening. It's not like a regular open window. And so you would build that right into the wall? Yeah, you could build it into the wall. You can get pre-manufactured metal louvers. You've probably seen a lot on gable vents. So like houses, right? So the attic vent is kind of sticking off the side there. That would be a louver. Oh, another thing sort of related to this maybe is you mentioned it might be a good idea as an observatory to have windows. Could you explain why? Yeah, so off-camera we were talking about our climate specifically. And because we have so much moisture in the spring and the fall, we often get mold and mildew, along with some rot, which we'll probably talk about later. But one thing is with that moisture and this particular structure that we're looking at, it's wood. Now mold, it's one thing that we're concerned about in New England quite a bit. And mold needs a few ingredients to grow. It needs a source of food. It needs water and it needs darkness. So it's nice when you close up the hatches and keep everything nice and sealed up in the daytime and the nighttime you roll it off. But in the daytime when you're not using your observatory, the most humid time in the warmest time, you're giving mold an opportunity to grow. So my recommendation would be to have a few windows in there to kind of keep the level of light up and kind of reduce at least one of the variables for a chance for mold to grow. Mold spores will, they'll feed on the wood, but that doesn't also mean that they can't get on all your equipment as well. So that reminds me that I've heard different things about sort of heat dissipation when you roll off the roof, you want the heat from the building to get out of there as quickly as possible. And so I've heard that wood is generally better for letting the heat off than concrete. But then I've also heard like the reason that a lot of people leave the inside of their buildings unfinished like that is because that will also help with getting the heat out quickly. Do you agree with all that or is there anything you could elaborate on? I would agree with that. Okay. Concrete is what we call a thermal mass. Once it warms up, it takes a while to dissipate, right? In older homes like this one, you probably have a big fireplace somewhere and fireplace made of stone, wintertime it warms up and it'll help disperse the heat and keep things warmer longer. The same is true for a concrete slab on grade. And in even some passive kind of low energy homes, we use concrete and dark flooring material like tile to kind of let the concrete absorb more light so that at night when the sun's gone and the temperature outside has cooled off, it releases that energy back into the building. So something like this, insulation is not really gonna help you a lot because you're gonna be rolling off the, the purpose is not to live in the space, right? The purpose is for astrophotography. So I would agree keeping the structure as light as possible. Even insulation will, I mean, the purpose of insulation is to slow down the transfer of air. And so when you roll off that roof, its job is to hold onto that warm air as long as possible. So yes, insulation would slow down the heat, the cooling of your observatory. Another question I had about these buildings is a lot of people with a roll-off roof, roll the roof off to the north. And my understanding is the main reason is just because it's important, more important to have a clear view to the east, west and south for astronomy purposes. I am gonna be pretty blocked by trees to the west. So I was thinking of instead rolling the roof off to the west because in terms of an obstruction, it's not gonna matter. But is there any engineering or structural reason to roll the roof off in a certain direction? No, not really. If you live in like a very open kind of flat region where you're susceptible to, you know, not like microbursts and like tornado quality, but like really heavy winds, it is, it would probably be beneficial for you to orientate your building kind of like a weather vane into the wind, right? So that you don't get kind of a side wind to try and lift up your roof or expose it to any more kind of severe wind than, you know, than normal. Something that I've heard from a number of people, including Alan, who I recently visited, you mentioned, is over time it becomes harder for the roof to roll off because of the roof, I mean, the building sort of changing over time. How do you, and it seems like people have different issues there, but what is sort of like general advice for how to prevent shift and for that to be a hard issue with a roll off roof building? Yeah, I mean, so most likely what's going on there is, I mean, in our climate, we have frost, right? And in some Southern climates and Western climates, they have what's called expansive soil, soil that holds moisture and water and the soil moves, right? So in either case, whether it's frost or expansive soils, we want to design a footing that is gonna best resist what we would expect to see in your local climate, right? So in our case, we're talking about piers. So we can't just build right on the ground like some Southern climates can. We have to dig deep and we have to dig below the frost line. So for New Hampshire, the code minimum is 48 inches. We've been talking about piers and just to make it clear, there's the piers that the telescope are gonna go onto and then there's the piers that the building are gonna go on to and in both cases, though, I have to dig a hole that's at least four feet deep and fill it with concrete. When I've been digging holes for other reasons, like my vegetable garden, I've noticed I have very rocky soil where I'm like taking out boulders like this big a lot. So what are your recommendations for digging holes if I want to do this myself? Yeah, so growing up in New England myself, I had to dig a lot of holes in this kind of ground. And what I recommend is you can get a post hole digger can help or just a spade shovel. A post hole digger is gonna help you dig a more straight hole. If you're using a long handled spade shovel, you'll have a more tapered hole just to be able to get down to the bottom. When you encounter a rock, I mean, as long as it's not the size of this table here, you know, those boulder, you know, the kind of a cobble size stones, what I recommend is getting, I've always called it a pry bar, but you can get them at most home centers or, you know, local hardware stores. It's about five feet long. It's a cylindrical rod at the bottom of it. It has a taper and at the top, it has a kind of a round flared end at the top. And it weighs about 50 pounds. And when you hit a rock, you know, you can pound the ground to kind of loosen it up. You can get beside the rock and kind of pry it into the hole. The idea here is that the girth of the hole can be large. The girth is not what we want to avoid. The depth of the hole we wanna be at four feet minimum to be below the frost line, but it's kind of imperative that when you're digging a hole that you don't go, the bottom of your concrete footing doesn't go below undisturbed soil. Soil that's been undisturbed has the highest compressive rate it's ever gonna have. Once you disturb it, there's no amount of pounding that you can do to kind of recreate that existing undisturbed capacity for the soil to resist load. In our conversation so far, what am I missing? What do you think are things that I haven't thought about and in building this myself? If we're doing a wood construction like you are, most cases people just dig the sonotube, they dig the holes, put the sonotube down and fill it and then they build their wood structure on top of it. But my recommendation to you and particularly in our climate where we have a lot of groundwater and moisture is to underneath of your building, remove all the organic material, not just where the posts are gonna go, but remove all the organic material and lay down plastic, a thick six mil or 10 mil plastic continuous underneath the whole thing. I hit a rock already, that's lovely. So the organic soil is this black stuff, right? And it's got the roots in it. Typically in New England, it's not gonna go very deep. When you're stripping the top soil, you'll just take the first 12 inches right off the top. And it's labor intensive, but you're removing all the ability for the soil to hold moisture in that spot. And you're replacing it with the plastic to keep the water from driving up and you're putting stone over the top to keep the plastic down. And something like that too, critters that do go under there aren't gonna be burrowing into that stone material. So it makes it less habitable for them. When I just had the plans, it was like sort of like a little bit loose in my mind and talking to you, it's like becoming a little bit more clear, I think. So this has been really helpful. Well, thank you so much, Tim. And hopefully this is helpful to other people building their observatories. I'm gonna be sharing my progress on the channel. And so hopefully people can give helpful advice in the comments and we can continue having discussions about this. Thank you very much, Nikol. This video is sponsored by Squarespace and I use Squarespace for my personal portfolio at NikolCarver.com because Squarespace makes it super easy with their website builder and their flexible but professional templates. There's a template for every kind of website you'd wanna make, but then of course you can customize them however you wish, quite easily with their drag and drop engine. And of course, since it's 2023, these designs look great on mobile devices like your smartphone through responsive design. I've also found Squarespace takes the hassle out of managing a website, no more fiddling with CSS for hours just to get something to look right. And there is a huge amount of included features with Squarespace, like if you need an online store, that's built in. So if you're looking for any kind of website, whether it's a portfolio of your photographs or a site for your business, I think you're gonna 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. All right, this has been Nico Carver at Nebula Photos. Clear skies, everyone.