My Heavens!: The Adventures of a Lonely Stargazer Building an Over-the-Top Observatory

My Heavens! charts the progress of the author’s own substantial observatory (with additional material from amateur constructors of large observatories elsewhere) from conception, through design, planning and construction, to using an observatory of the kind that all amateur astronomers would aspire to own. This book tells the “warts and all” story of small beginnings in amateur astronomy, leading to the construction of a “top of the range” observatory at a house on the edge of a country village between Oxford and London. The author is a qualified building surveyor, and looks at building the observatory from his own professional perspective. There were of course many errors, problems, technical and organizational difficulties along the way, and the author never shies away from admitting his mistakes – and in doing so he reduces the chances of others falling into the same traps. Comparisons are made with similar large projects in the USA, taking a look at the differences and similarities in planning and building regulations, and in construction methods on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually an observatory materialized, set up to facilitate the taking of very high quality images of the deep sky on those special days of best seeing. The story doesn’t end with the construction of the observatory, but goes on to describe the author’s choice of equipment, setting it up, and his own techniques for obtaining superb astronomical images like the ones he shows in his book.