A personal observatory is the dream of any amateur astronomer. For me a long desired dream to come true. But like a journey, you will know wat to expect only after you have made that journay. And for each astronomer there is a unique journey for him. Anyway, knowing other experiences will at least help in avoiding the most dangerous mistakes and be advised of problems that may happens.
There is no cookbook on how to create an observatory. Infact theneeds and constraints of each astronomer ar so distincht that create a unmbelieveble number of combinations. So you’ll not find any recipe here. But I’ll show you what were my goals and constraints.
The observatory shoud host one or better two telescopes a Lzos 205 refractor and a CFF 350 Dall Kirkham.
My gooals were to have an remote controllable observatory, not too far from my house, where the sky was better than at my home wtch is Bortle 7/8. An’other requirement was to reduce as much possible the thermal disturbance near the scope to improve high definition imaging.
So the main project activities were: finding a suitable terrain, prepare the terrain, provide a reliable power source, design the observatory, design the remote control system, setup the telescopes.
Each of these phases have provided to be much more difficult that I ever expected.