Amateur Astronomy Club

Progress on Observatory Cleanup and Major Enhancements

Thanks to Aldrich Members Kim Lemerise, Jim Zebrowski, Steve Bodine, Russ Chaplis, and Kevin Boucher a great deal of work has been accomplished at the Observatory site on Sunday 4/2 and some days earlier in the week.

As you can see in the pictures below, grounds work was performed by cutting up a fallen tree to be used for firewood in our pit, and also some ruts were removed and smoothed out near the entrance to the Observatory.

And more exciting work was performed in the Observatory in our efforts to swap our current 10″ Meade SCT on the AP1100GTO Mount for the larger 14″ Celestron Edge HD SCT on the Astro-Physics 1600GTO-AEL mount. Once again we need to thank Aldrich Member and Benefactor Fran Edwards for donating BOTH Astro-Physics mounts and the new Pier and Celestron telescope we are installing. Anyway the old scope/mount was taken down and replaced by the new Pier and Mount on Sunday. The new mount was roughly polar aligned and still needs to be wired and be balanced with the Celestron Telescope. We hope to get all this work done by the end of the week of 4/3. We will still need to precisely polar-align the scope before it is ready for our first Star Party at the end of the month.

We will keep you updated on progress. But check out the pictures below of the recent efforts, and a BIG THANK YOU to all the members involved.