In October 2007 we applied for a grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents to rebuild the old observatory. The grant was approved in June 2008 and construction began in late 2008 after some delays getting the designs finalized for the fire marshall and bids out to contractors. The current exterior of the observatory is shown above. The old exterior of the observatory is shown below. The original design was a roll off roof that was heavy and did not seal the building well from the elements. The new design uses a 15 ft Technical Innovations dome.
We examined several site possibilities. The original site (shown above) is just west of Grambling on the site of Camp Ruston an old WWII prisoner of war camp halfway between Grambling and Simsboro. The property was cleared of trees in the 1980s and is now part of the Louisiana Tech Livestock Unit of Tech Farms. The old observatory building was built ca. 1965 and was dedicated in 1967. The adjacent properties were developed as an industrial park starting in the 1970s, but the Tech Farm property remains as a large open space with clear views down to the horizon.
The light pollution map shows this area as yellow shading to orange (about where the I20 shield is left of center on the light pollution map below). There is a oriented strand board plant just to the west of the site which runs 24 hours a day. There are better sites towards Vernon and Chatham, but there is no property owned by the university in that area and we were concerned about easy access to the site for undergraduate research and classes. Keeping the old site seems the best compromise at this point. Future plans may include a dark sky site if we get good results from the rebuilt telescope and can justify such an effort. Despite the proximity to Grambling and Simsboro the site has decent 5th to 5.5th magnitude skies on an average clear night except for low in the east over the Grambling exit on I20, low to the southeast over Grambling or directly west over the plant. These are near the horizon, below 30 degrees altitude, and won't affect the main mission of the observatory which is photometry. A. Danko's site has a useful tool -- Clear Sky Chart for the observatory.
The observatory telescope had Cave 12.5 inch f7 optics. Here is a photo of what the telescope would have looked like if it had been bought as a finished telescope from Cave. The woman gives a sense of scale. Actually the telescope was designed and built by a group of Tech faculty as a Springfield mount with a fixed eyepiece position -- the mount is shown below without the optical tube. The optical tube assembly was dismounted and the optics were removed when the observatory was abandoned in the 1990s. The primary mirror was tested and recoated by OMI in 2008 and is about 1/7-1/8th wave with a Strehl ratio of 0.94 so it was decided to reuse the optics and seek funds for a larger telescope later.
Shown below is a prototype of the new telescope we are installing. The finished telescope will reuse the original Cave optics on a Paramount ME german equatorial mount. This prototype uses 10" f5.6 Coulter optics and is shown here on a Celestron CGE mount. The Paramount ME delivery was delayed but it arrived and has just been installed on February (Friday the 13th), replacing the CGE on the prototype, and is now ready for use.
The preliminary tests with the prototype look good. Here is a image of M81 from the first night's photos (inverted to show the arms better) and of M42. Nathan Wallace helped with setting up the telescope for these images.
This image of M81 and M82, and the Horsehead and "Flame" nebula image at the top of the page, were taken February 20th after the telescope was remounted on the Paramount and recollimated
Above: The central part of the Rossette contains a star cluster, NGC 2244. This is a composite of five 60 second exposures aligned and stacked.
Above: The "Cone" nebula is on the left while the nebula around 15 Mon is NGC 2264. This is just the central portion of a larger complex.
