Blogs

Site Selection

First things first, before I can build anything, I need to locate an appropriate part of my property that offered the following benefits:

• Located somewhere on my property
• Far enough from the house, so that lighting from the house won't be an issue,
• Close enough to the house, so that snow clearing won't be an issue
• Oriented in such a manner that traffic down my driveway doesn't cause an adverse effect.
• Situated in some manner to maximize the celestial view
• Situated in some manner to minimize the effects of light pollution from the city of Winnipeg

To be frank, my wife and I own 60 acres of property, most of it forest.  The house site is sitting on about 2-3 acres of relatively cleared land.  Fifteen acres has been cleared for horse pastures, but the remainder is primarily forest.  But as you can guess, with all that land, I can't find a place to put my observatory!

To this end, I started out with a aerial map of my property (thank you Google Earth), and followed that up with a walk through the cleared pasture land (during the middle of winter I might add).  I quickly came to realize that although our eastern horse pasture is probably the best site to set up on, the distance from the house will likely be an issue, particularly in the winter time, when I would need to clear a path nearly 200 metres long.

Therefore, using Google Earth, I took this aerial snapshot, which shows/displays the main house site, including my wife's front pasture:

Using the same snapshot, I've added some markings/lines to indicate changes to my wife's electric fence lines.  The red line is where I'm going to have to install new electric fence line, fence posts and rails.  The blue line is where I'm going to remove existing fence line, posts and rails.  The yellow line is fence line that I'm going to have to readjust/fix, so that it is on the inside of the horse pen.  With the "blue" lines removed, and the "red" line installed, the "yellow" line is on the outside of the fence.

To put this all into perspective, the silver rectangular object near the top centre, is our 1400 square foot home (bungalow).  The gray square object near the top right, is my wife's 36x36 ft barn.  All told, the space I'm clearing up for myself is roughly 48ft x 56 ft.  Further, in these images, south is roughly in the bottom left corner.