I crossed paths with Eric in the spring of 2021 as we were both trying to solve a problem with daytime exposures with Thomas Jacquin’s excellent open source All Sky Camera software. The problem was not with Thomas’s program but rather with the ZWO sdk. Eric and I have been working to solve that problem and Eric has also been making some other enhancements. Stay tuned for more about hat later.

Eric mentioned that he was going to spend some time at his remote observatory in New Mexico and asked if I’d like a virtual tour. I jumped at the chance and asked if we could do a video on it. He graciously agreed and we met on Zoom.

Eric has a great observatory with some fantastic equipment! His internet connection at the observatory, however, currently is a bit lacking in upstream bandwidth. That makes for some fairly low resolution video unfortunately but I think the viewer will still get a good view.

There are also a couple of minutes toward the end where Eric’s audio becomes somewhat garbled. I put captions on this to help with understanding but the gist of this section was that were talking about his west wall and what compromises it caused. His answer was that it wasn’t really a problem. Then I asked about how he determined how tall his piers needed to be. He said that he measured the wall and then measured the height of the mount with the equipment and determined the pier height needed to see over the wall.

I hope you enjoy the video! Eric’s attention to detail is fantastic and I think this will be a great resource for anyone interested in setting up a remote observatory.