Repurposing an old pier
This is a solar radio telescope pier from the decommissioned Algonquin Radio Telescope site in Ontario. We picked it up a few years ago with the intent to stick a dish on it and refurbish it for a do it yourself radio telescope. As it turns out, it is/was a little overkill for our purposes, including the fact that we would probably never have a 600vac power supply around to run the thing.
So, we are going to repurpose it.
Specifically the 400kg+ dish part comes off and leaves us with a 100kg steel pier, to be used to mount an optical telescope.
It didn’t take much time to tip it over, douse it in WD40 penetrating oil and take it apart. The dish went to the back and we brought the pier forward.
A few hours of removing attached braces and boxes, another couple of hours digging down to limestone/bedrock and presto! we were done.
Well.. almost done… it will be scraped down and painted tomorrow with a metal rust paint, well cover up the dish part with a nice tarp or two and start work on the observatory to go around this pier.
It is pretty close to level at the moment. Any telescope mount should be able to compensate for the difference.