Happy Birthday

Well, it's a birthday of sorts, anyway.

This weekend marked the third anniversary of first light for my 10 inch SkyWatcher Dobsonian.

I thought of celebrating the occasion with candles, cake, beer, loud music, and dancing, but settled on posting some pictures of the telescope's arrival, unboxing, and construction instead.

The delivery truck unceremoniously dumped the boxes at the end of the driveway, but dear wifie dragged them into the garage for safekeeping until I could get home from work.  As delivered, there was a huge gaping hole in Optical Tube Assembly (OTA) box.  Not an auspicious sign, but it turned out that there was no damage.

The hole looks like a door flap.  What's up with that?

I moved the boxes into the hallway near the entrance of my home office.  Not enough room in the office for opening them.

"F-R-A-G-I-L-E." Must be Italian. 

The OTA, in protective wrapping.

Looks okay.  No shards of rattling glass, anyway.

Unwrapping the OTA.

It's big.

The struts extend.

An AstroZap shroud is in my future.

The base has a lot of pieces.  It'll take hours to construct.

Emma, our gray short haired feline domestic cat is inspecting.

All of the pieces fit together, nicely.  I had a little bit of trouble with the hand controller mounting bracket, but all things considered, that was a pretty minor problem. 

Beautiful, loving, kind wifie, wearing Santa hat, next to telescope.

Constructing the telescope was the easy part.  It took months of trial and error to develop some skill at using it. 

😎