In 1999, I purchased land on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii in a very dark location away from the city lights. Ironwood Observatory began construction soon after with an 8’ x 10’ wood framed building to house a 6’ Technical Innovations Home Dome.

My goal at that time was to learn how to do astrophotography. The first configuration was a very basic manually operated dome. The first imaging platform was a Losmandy G-11 mount, Celestron C-11 telescope and an Olympus OM1 camera. Soon I was looking for a good guiding system and purchased a SBIG STV camera. Later that year I added a SBIG ST-7. It was not long after that I changed the observatory equipment to find the correct combination of equipment that would work for my environment. During the years I have had many different combinations of equipment installed in the observatory.

Many people over the years have shared their knowledge with me and I appreciated everyone who did so. One thing I like about astronomy is that most of the people in the field are very talented and generous individuals.
Akihiko Ito is one of Japan’s leading astrophotographers. Akihiko was my inspiration to go into the remote telescope operation. One night he said to me “If I had great skies like you I could make better images.” I considered it for a moment and said “Ok, we will do that.” It was then that I decided to reconfigure my observatory for remote users. Together we tested the different software and finally became happy with the observatory’s operation. In early 2004, Akihiko and I were featured in a magazine article in Japan’s Hoshinavi magazine’s story about two friends working together across the sea.

There were many others who contributed their talents to the genesis of the Ironwood Observatory. They are listed on the contributors list to show my appreciation to all of them.

The observatory is completely automated with the following features:

  - Turns itself on and off at sunset and sunrise
  - Weather aware and self protected
  - Is remotely operated from anywhere an internet connection is available
  - Runs unattended scripted imaging surveys

The equipment is common observatory equipment that can be purchased from astronomy equipment suppliers like Oceanside Camera and Telescope. What is important is making the right choices for the job and the user’s budget. There are many different possible combinations of equipment that will work. The present combination of equipment works well for unguided imaging during nights of scattered clouds. This has given me many more nights of observatory use over just imaging with an auto guiding setup. With this setup we can do a scripted unattended search for asteroids, comets and super novae. We can also do unattended imaging to acquire data to create breathtaking pictures of deep space.

I have included some images of the present setup. This is not an endorsement of any one equipment combination. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at kenarcher@ironwoodobservatory.com or call 808-375-3050.