Here are some pictures of our Observatory located 80 miles west of Downtown Houston. To use the site, all you need to be is a dues paying member. No additional charges or "use fee". You can go out for the day or for a week using a tent or a "home on wheels".
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This is an aerial view of
our site. You can see the building
to the left and the "happy face" of the pads affectionately called "pad henge". For another aerial view from
Terraserver, click
here.
Bob Rogers snapped this photo of a new resident at our observatory.
Here is our new cover for our bbq pit area. Thanks, Larry Wadle, for making this welcome addition possible.
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This shows our
observatory, a 16 x 33 main room with the roof rolled back on its supports. The
building is cinder block construction and a thick steel roof weighing an
estimated 3 tons. Also in the observatory is a "chart room" that contains a
desk, sofa and reference charts for use on those cold nights.
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Inside the observatory we have 3 telescopes:
- (Foreground) 12.5" f/5 built in the late '70s. It was originally designed to be "transportable" and then modified to be permanently mounted in the observatory. It is a "low profile" scope in that the "vertically challenged" need only a step stool to get to the eyepiece when the scope is at the zenith. This is used for visual as well as photography.
- (Background) 12.5 f/7 that was originally owned by NASA and used during the Apollo program to help locate a lunar landing site.
- (Middle) Celestron-14 that is used extensively for photography and CCD'ing. The telescope has been fitted with computer-controlled drive motors for tracking and "go to" capabilities. See the special page for this telescope.
Because of the low profile f/5 and the high walls of the building, the southern skies would be inaccessible for this scope. So we made the southern wall a "fold down window" that can be lowered so the southern sky is visible. In the picture you can see the window in the down position.
