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It was decided that constructing an observatory located in our backyard would be a worthwhile idea to fully utilize the suburban skies overhead. As stated on the main Observing page, the skies are 5th magnitude straight up with the Milky Way easily spotted from the top of Sagittarius to the bottom of Cass. in the summer (the Winter Milky Way is totally invisible). Furthermore, having an observatory would help to take advantage of the full 360degree horizons I have. Right now I find myself observing on my back-deck which is fine, except for that darn house! I lose the entire northern sky since the house is in the way. By moving out further into our field, we get a better angle over the house.
My house is situated on 2.75 acres of land, all open with another, roughly 25-30 acres of open land (including a county park) on all four sides of our land. There are three street lights around; two are completely blocked by trees and the third is a sneaky one since you have to angle yourself just right into to put a tree between yourself and it. Local light pollution really is not a problem at all, but the farms around here use huge lights to light up the land around their barns at night which sends a white glow up into the sky. However, despite all that I find haze in the atmosphere to be the biggest problem here. We are at sea-level and when there's haze in the air, it's there! You can have a totally clear sky, but the haze between you and the stars is unbelievable. On nights of low humidity we get some of the best observing, equal to or even surpassing the dark sky sites that my astronomy club uses.
So when will this project be started? We had planned on beginning it this summer, but the weather did not cooperate since it was unbearably hot to be outside for hours and hours on end constructing this structure. Once we begin, which looks like next spring, the observatory will be a 10' x 10' roll-off with a removable pier. A removable pier is going to be used since I will not only be using my 6" Criterion EQ or 76mm f/16 EQ refractor but also my two Dobsonians (the 12.5" and the 8") and I am going to need every inch of observatory width so that my 12.5" Dob won't be sticking out over the edge of the wall. On nights when I want to do photography, I'll snap the pier into place. On other nights I'll leave the pier out of the observatory and put one of my Dobsonians in the observatory and use that for the night.
As of now I have no thoughts on the performance or usefulness of the observatory since it is still in the planning stages. Once we get deeper into planning more information will be posted.