Ad Astra Observatory

I was downtown, having a fancy date with my wife, when we got a text from W_, who was watching the house for the evening.

It had been quite windy all day, solid whitecaps on the windward side of the 520 bridge, nearly getting blown over while walking around, as we’d come out from behind buildings at each intersection downtown.

The observatory has been standing for 2 years now, and I’d never had any problems with wind before, except I’d forgotten something; perhaps you’ll get there before I do.

Just as we were about to bed down for the evening, here’s what we found on the phone:

My first thought was “It’s cloudy, why did W_ open up the roof?”, and then I saw this one:

It was quarter to midnight, and it wasn’t raining, but this is not something I was prepared to wait around with — we checked out of the hotel and drove home, while I worried about the upper shutter coming off (it can’t — there’s a cable holding it down), fiberglass repair, and standing on a possibly wet roof in the dark.

When I got home, I did a walkthrough of the shed, everything (well, except for the one, obvious, thing) seemed fine; there really hadn’t been any rain, as the wind was on the tail end of the storm that’s been parked over us for a week.

I also did a close inspection of the shutter, expecting the worst (I was already thinking about how to get a new shutter shipped from the manufacturer, or whether a local fiberglass repair shop could fix-or-replace it); it turned out that, barring a bit of mud and grass, the shutter was in absolutely perfect shape. I asked W_ where he found it, and it had apparently been thrown about 25′ to the northwest of the shed, and missed the building (and anything else more solid than wet sod) completely on the way down! 😮

A couple of minutes with a damp rag, and the shutter was ready to go back on. W_ was kind enough to help me wrestle the fairly awkward chunk of fiberglass up the ladder (it fit through the hatch due to the power of the Triangle Inequality, bonus!), and I hopped out onto the roof while he assisted from inside. Getting the shutter popped back in place was simple; lay it in place, lift the upper shutter slightly, to let the French cleat engage, and a quick open-close maneuver to let everything settle, and we were done. I tied a piece of rope to the inner shutter handle and to one of the roof supports; that’ll keep this from happening again.

So what happened? Well, it turns out that if you have the shutter motor installed, the cables hold the shutter onto the dome. For installations without motors, TI drills a hole through the flanges on the dome and shutter, so that a cotter pin can be inserted, to lock the lower shutter in place. I don’t have this hole, because I had them pre-drill for motors. And of course, when I disconnected the motor cable a month ago, I should have remembered to take precautions against wind.

In all, I’m damned lucky that nothing got damaged — so many things could have gone wrong, and none of them did. I owe my wife a night in a fancy hotel, and the observatory really needs to work on its separation anxiety.