Early in our relationship my wife mentioned that her father was the type of person who would get heavily into a hobby for a short period of time. Some people maintain roughly the same hobbies for decades, I'm like that. Others go extremely hardcore into something then move on once they've mastered it. My then future father in-law was the latter.
When I started dating my wife he had recently obtained a pilot's license. I never once heard of him flying after that. In the time I knew him there was building a custom bicycle, becoming a church deacon, patio construction, and the observatory.
That's right, in the summer of 2000 he fulfilled a dream of building a backyard observatory capable of viewing distant objects.
Did it make sense to build an observatory in the Chicago suburbs with light pollution and low elevation? No. I don't think that mattered, the point of this project was to pull it off.
Did his village board understand exactly what they were approving when he submitted the permit? Also no. During construction someone reported it and whoever showed up was very surprised that everything was in order.
He passed away rather young from heart disease. I'm posting this over a decade later near what would have been his 70th birthday. I helped my mother in-law by archiving all his data and saved a copy of these observatory photos for an eventual post like this.
Please do not contact me about the equipment pictured - it is long gone.
While building the observatory he set up a web page to document the progress. It was GeoCities or Angelfire or another like them. Reminder, this was the year 2000. Learning HTML was not a passion project so the page was a set of images with text. Please forgive spelling and grammar errors. He was obviously very smart, but not an academic. Based on stories told at his funeral I think his high school graduated him just to get him out of there.
Here are photos of the construction. Some of them are in the previous set of images but smaller.
Here are photos of the various components that went into the observatory. I don't know what any of this is. I'm sure he explained what everything was to me at least once.
I noted before that the point of this project was to do it. I am 100% certain he was more passionate about building this observatory than using it. He had many photos saved and I could only weed out a few that I'm confident came from this observatory. I based this off exif data and reverse image searches for exact matches (obviously there are similar matches). Some of these images were enhanced or edited a little. There are photos I excluded due to being exact matches but I'm still not sure I made the right call. On average celestial objects don't change much over time so it's very likely photos he took are identical to ones others took and posted online.
I think these are all early photos. He made some upgrades over the next few years, before obsessing over a new project. I know for a fact this setup was capable of viewing the Galilean moons, because I saw them, but there are no photos of them. Using the observatory meant staying up very late or waking up very early. I only experienced it a couple of times.
This little gallery is a reminder that life is short, and if you have a dream project you should start it.
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