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The blogger editing is all over the place. I'll come back later to see if I can make it tidier. The images won't drag and drop [again!]
17.00 I managed to sever the timbers holding the last clad panel. Then attached the ratchet straps to the car tow hook. I leaned on the strap and the whole observatory floor toppled over. I was so surprised I fell backwards and landed on my bum!
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Progress on the demolition of my 2-storey observatory continues. Great care had to be taken not to have the heavy timbers fall on me. In the end I used my car to pull individual timbers free. Removing the massive pier was very time consuming.
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Each of the eight uprights and pier legs is anchored to a massive concrete block. Attached via heavy steel brackets and buried in self stabilizing gravel. The building does not want to move to tentative trials with the chain hoist. The tensioning gear is all rated at one ton capacity or more. The concrete around the heavy steel post goes deep and is pyramidal in form for stability.
The big, internal [warehouse] stepladder is now too heavy for me to lift out. Though that is how it went in. I can still remember the immense struggle to lift it into place. There are four timber joists between the top and the necessary freedom to be lowered gently to the west.
I have now attached a heavy ratchet strap to my chain hoist. Both are now firmly anchored at the steel post. Which once held my 2.4m parabolic dish for UK TV reception. The idea is to be able to apply heavy tension to the top of the nearest upright of the observatory. Hopefully avoiding potential damage to the workshop standing alongside.
Working on taking the observatory down is the very opposite. Of designing and constructing it as I went along. Instead of being driven and creative at every turn. I am now fighting the depression of melancholic nostalgia. I spent countless hours in the observatory. Mostly imaging the sun but the moon as well. Every moment while capturing short videos I would be thinking of ways to improve what I had already built and what could be better.
My late wife had become an astronomy widow. Instead of a cycling widow. I no longer rode tens of thousands of kilometers all over the middle of Denmark on my racing-touring trike. I was nearby, safe from traffic accidents and ready to help with household chores.
This intimate association between astronomy and my wife's lingering death to cancer. Destroyed all hope of my returning to my lifelong hobby after her passing. I had been building telescopes since my middle teens. For well over sixty years. Most of it the result of far too little pocket money and an unbreakable obsession with the subject matter.
I would come in from my observatory. Excited at my latest capture of some small detail on the sun's surface. While my wife descended into ever deeper depression. She flatly refused to contact the doctor and would get extremely angry every time I even raised the subject.
Towards the end, I would talk to the doctor on my mobile phone. For I dare not speak of her condition on the indoor telephone. I was in tears at my frustration as she went ever further downhill. Once the doctor had called and had her taken to hospital by ambulance, it was already far too late. The cancer had spread beyond any hope of treatment at her age and in her badly weakened physical and mental condition. My wife died within days of discharging herself from hospital.
Between her doses of morphine we talked more in those few days than we had in years. We had been married for 55 years. I barely recognized her as I bid her goodbye in her coffin. Outside and within yards of the observatory and the even larger dome I had been working on.
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