White Oak Observatory

BLOG Concerning Jim Bruton’s Practicing Amateur Astronomy Without a License

Notes from the cloudy state of Oregon, Part 1: What can a 71 mm refractor and a DSLR accomplish?

House Roof

December 6, 2024. Again, now, see, some people might have used a fork lift. Not this guy.

Sketch I made of the ramp. It’s a 3:1 mechanical advantage.

I pulled one end at a time.

January 10, 2025 lunar occultation of Mars, which is seen at about 7 o’clock several minutes before the moon moved in front.

As I was adding vigas my neighbor, Dave Churchill, whose remotely-operated twin domes, dubbed the “double Ds,” had graced the landscape for years, finally brought in his manufactured house on two trucks.

February of 2025. Vigas all now placed, I had a little station here on the patio where I brought the boards from the garage on the truck, oiled them on two sawhorses, stacked them to dry against a wall, then plucked them up as I added them to the deck above.

Winter morning sun

The deck begins to go on. The edge has not yet been built atop the bond beam.

The ooiled boards sticking up where I’d grab ’em and put them on the deck.

The “gringo blocks” to which the rough bucks are screwed are oddly placed, but it sort of made sense at the time.

February 21, 2025, bringing in the second load of deck boards from Tucson.

Used quite a bit of that Australian Timber Oil. They don’t sell it in larger cans.

February, 2023. Here I’m placing the forms on the east and west wall tops.

These forms are filled with rubble and concrete. The insides of the boards are studded with 6″ nails to help adhere the boards to the concrete.

This test gnomon is 1 m high.

April 3, 2025

April 14, 2025 — The trusses finally go up.

I still get tickled by this. The trusses “float” perched at their ends on the two strips of wood running along the north and south edges of the deck.

Adding the OSB. In retrospect I might have better used plywood.

The roof underlayment was finished on 30 June, 2025, and would have to sit there protecting the OSB underneath until November!

27 November, 2025. First Luc and I had to build the fascia or whatever it’s called.

29 November, 2025 and we begin putting on the metal roof.

Alas my trusty sundial broke. You can see it was pretty warped anyway.

30 November, 2025.

2 December, 2025. Luc had to get home so we had to leave this last bit of roof for a while.

This is the actual trip miles from the Oregon house. Exactly what Maps predicted.

Equinox sunrise.

29 July, 2026. We added cedar boards on the ends, but it took a couple of trips. .

This is the west end, and we boarded this one second because it was getting hotter and we wanted to have cool mornings of shade here to work.

3 July, 2026. The white Nexdome has been removed and pieces stacked on the patio.

4 July, 2026, the last day I was there at ASV. My planned return is for late December, 2026. This is the POD (Personal Observatory Dome) put back together after I removed the white dome.

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