Ad Astra Observatory

After the heroic effort that everyone put in on Saturday, I had just a few things to take care of in order to get hooked up to the house main breaker panel.

I made a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up a few final parts, and spent some time getting things installed. In particular, while I was looking for proper grounding rod installation technique, I found a little half-realized comment, and figured out that although you bond together ground and neutral in a main panel, you do NOT do that in a subpanel! You have to have separate buses for N and GND in subpanels. Whew, glad I figured that one out before installing the main breaker. 🙂

I needed to wire up a couple of three-way switches, and install three or four outlets, and suddenly all the internal wiring in the observatory was done!

I unplugged the computers and telescope, just in case.

I induced a quick power outage in the house so that I could install the main breaker (turns out that Eaton makes breakers for my 40yo main panel), and with just a little bit of trepidation, I threw the main breaker to power up the observatory. No excitement occurred at this point.

I then headed out to the shed, to throw the breakers there, too. I decided to do the “dirty” side first, since that was the one that had gotten all the recent attention. Again, no excitement occurred.

Then I threw the black breaker, to turn on the “clean” side of the observatory. Wow, ok, still boring. Small sigh of relief.

I screwed a red bulb into one of the light fixtures, and tested the three-way action. Worked perfectly.

Went inside, grabbed a couple of white bulbs, again these worked perfectly.

Ad Astra Observatory at Hilltop in Woodinville, WA first “light”! Feel the power… 🙂

I need to get the grounding rods installed (currently, I’m working off the house ground), and then I’m ready for an electrical inspection.