Authors:
- Describes how to set up a high class amateur observatory
- Written by a qualified building surveyor, it looks at the planning, building and construction from a professional viewpoint
- For those with more modest ambitions, the book offers many hints, tips and design features for smaller observatories
- Points out the pitfalls to beware of!
- Gives an overview of deep sky imaging – not an expert tutorial, but a first-hand guide from novice to experienced observer
- Adds some entertaining vignettes of members of the world amateur astronomical fraternity
Part of the book series: The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series (PATRICKMOORE)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
My Heavens! charts the progress of the author’s own substantial observatory (with additional material from amateur constructors of large observatories elsewhere) from conception, through design, planning and construction, to using an observatory of the kind that all amateur astronomers would aspire to own.
This book tells the “warts and all” story of small beginnings in amateur astronomy, leading to the construction of a “top of the range” observatory at a house on the edge of a country village between Oxford and London. The author is a qualified building surveyor, and looks at building the observatory from his own professional perspective. There were of course many errors, problems, technical and organizational difficulties along the way, and the author never shies away from admitting his mistakes – and in doing so he reduces the chances of others falling into the same traps. Comparisons are made with similar large projects in the USA, taking a look at the differences and similarities in planning and building regulations, and in construction methods on both sides of the Atlantic.
Eventually an observatory materialized, set up to facilitate the taking of very high quality images of the deep sky on those special days of best seeing.
The story doesn’t end with the construction of the observatory, but goes on to describe the author’s choice of equipment, setting it up, and his own techniques for obtaining superb astronomical images like the ones he shows in his book.
Authors and Affiliations
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The Crendon Observatory, England
Gordon Rogers
About the author
Gordon Rogers lives in England. He is a qualified building surveyor, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors as well as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. His beautiful deep-sky images regularly appear in the astronomical magazines. He contributed a chapter to More Small Observatories, by Sir Patrick Moore (Springer, 2002). He lives in what is probably the only traditional English part-thatched cottage to feature an observatory dome!
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: My Heavens!
Book Subtitle: The Adventures of a Lonely Stargazer Building an Over-the-Top Observatory
Authors: Gordon Rogers
Series Title: The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73783-6
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag New York 2008
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-387-73781-2Published: 06 December 2007
eBook ISBN: 978-0-387-73783-6Published: 28 October 2007
Series ISSN: 1431-9756
Series E-ISSN: 2197-6562
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 180
Topics: Astronomy, Observations and Techniques, Popular Science in Astronomy