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Pier

I picked the only decent location in our back yard that would give us reasonable horizons and had a hole bored about 10 feet down.  I used a compass and a few nights viewings to mark North and South posts.  I setup a sonor tube and some rebar and also placed 6 foot long threaded rods on the proper spacing and held them in place with a spacer board.  I mixed and poured sacreet by hand but it really didn’t take that long before I had it poured.  My brother Jim had made me a steel pier several years earlier so I bolted that on top of the concrete pier once it was dry and bolted my Meade superwedge on top.  I was concerned that my alignment might not have been good enough but the first night out showed that it was pretty much dead on.

Here are a few pics of the pier going in...

 
Sonor tube in the hole and pouring in the concrete


   
Setting the attachment rods and leveling


And here is my LX200 sitting on the finished pier...

I'm 6 feet tall and the pier is set so the eyepiece would basically be eye level for me without the floor.  I did it that way so that it would be about 10" below eye level for me once the floor was installed.  My wife and kids aren't as tall as I (duh) and I didn't want to have to use more than a small step stool for them.  Since I will mostly be imaging through the scope when I am alone and since I intend to operate it remotely from inside my house much of the time, I figured the lower eye piece should not pose too big a problem.  We'll see if time proves that to be true or not.