Very Big Week

Monday was sandblasting and paint day.

Sandblasting, on my fun shit-o-meter, is around a negative 5, just above going to the dentist for a root canal, but it went well.

The paint is a flat black spray can combination primer/paint that coated nicely and covered with only 3 applications. Tuesday was drying day.

Newly painted and sandblasted pier and wedge.

Jim arrived on Tuesday afternoon bringing all kinds of goodies with him including the CCD camera and it's manual, Photoshop 8, Photoshop Astronomy and a DVD astronomy course from the University of California, Berkeley entitled

Understanding the Universe.

He had told me last week how large the camera manual was, and I have to say the man does not exaggerate. The damn thing is huge. Watch for a separate blog posting on the camera later.

Earlier, I had also test fitted the wedge base plate to the bottom of the telescope and then packed the scope back into the shipping box for the last 3 mile trip to it's new home and I put up a set of scaffolding in the newly cleaned observatory.

Wednesday Jim was all fired up to mount the scope so we started by putting up the second set of scaffolding and then planking across the back of both scaffolds.

Then a trip out to the storage building for the telescope box and the wedge. When we got back to the observatory we placed the scope box on the rear planking and the wedge under the right set of scaffolding.

On the second trip we hauled the steel pier over, carried it in and installed it to the concrete pier. We then leveled it and tightened down the 3/4 inch anchor bolts.

On our third trip we picked up Jim's wife Michelle and headed into Grand Marais for lunch and 10 bags of sand to fill the steel pier, a must to deaden any ringing vibration if the pier is bumped. On the way back Jim asked Michelle if she would help us out and the three of us now had some heavy work to get done.

Filling the pier with sand was no big deal but lifting the 168 pound wedge from the floor to the top of the 6' tall pier hurt pretty good and we still had to lift the man killer telescope. It was even difficult getting the lid off the scope box inside the observatory with such limited room! With Michelle on a step ladder where she could see the bolt holes, we made the big lift and got the center bolt started, the other three bolts went right in and we then celebrated with Advil all around!

It was nice just to sit and look over all this hard work coming together.