What a busy (and lovely) day it has been!
Painting the scope room was first thing on the agenda. I bought the paint earlier in the week. I was looking for something reasonably dark for the scope room and having browsed through some colours, how could I not go with “Galaxy Blue”? My daughter was keen to help, so out came the rollers and brushes and for the first time in what seems like ages I rolled the roof back so we could work in the sunshine as much as possible. With two of us it went very quickly and by lunchtime the majority was done. In some lights the paint does look quite grey, but in others it’s definitely blue.
We also decided to paint the sides of the roof — I’m not going to bother with the actual roof yet, in case I decide I need to insulate it. That’s a decision for another time. I still have the gables to paint as well, but again I’m thinking about adding ventilation to those so they can wait for a bit. And obviously the end flap isn’t finished enough to paint yet.
But with all the other painting done in the scope room we fitted the aluminium section back into the walls and then broke out the roll of LEDs. The self-adhesive tape on the back made fitting them a doddle, though I did have to think for a few minutes about which end to start from and whether I needed to unroll the entire reel first, as the connectors are male at one end and female at the other. Fortunately it worked out that we could start from the scope room window with the loose end of the reel. We felt it was necessary to finish everything off at that point and my daughter was keen to play with the mitre box and razor saw, so she did all the cutting of the diffuser and I did the measuring and fitting.
And here’s the result (maximum white, with the camera flash on)
This is maximum red, this time with the flash off:
And minimum red:
That’s all with the standard control unit that came with the LED strip. When I plugged in the wifi control unit I discovered that it would actually allow the LEDs to be dimmed even further:
It’s hard to judge without being dark-adapted, especially after spending most of the day in the sunshine, but I think the red will certainly work ok. The white is harder to judge. I might wander out after dark this evening and see what it looks like.
I did notice that the wifi unit has a tendency to whine when the colour settings are in the middle of the range which might be irritating, but I probably won’t be using that part anyhow, and if I’m in the warm room I probably won’t be able to hear it anyhow.
Not sure what I shall work on next. I shall have a think on that this evening. Had I trusted the weather forecast I should have planned a bit further ahead and sorted out the remainder of the bits to allow me to finish doing the EPDM on the rolling roof. As it is it might be a good idea to get at least one pier finished so I can actually start using the observatory before its first birthday.