I am located about 50 miles Northwest of Boston Massachusetts with an elevation of about 1160 feet. I have fairly dark skies but we have a lot of tall trees in the area. I managed to find an area just off the side of our house that gave me a clear view of the north pole (that is after I cut down a couple 40 foot trees) and a good view of the sky from the Southeast to just about West-Northwest. My observatory is up off the ground by 2 feet this helps clear a large part of the roof of my house.

     My equipment consists of:

• Celestron C11 XLT

• Celestron 80ED used for Guiding or Wide field photography

• G11 Mount with Gemini L4 Controller

• Q-Guider Camera from CCD Labs

• CCD Labs Q8-HR 6.11 mega pixel Color Camera

• Meade DSI (Used for Guiding and Planetary Photography

• Meade Micro Focuser used on my 80ED
  Moonlight Focuser with High Res Stepper motor with Cercis controller

• FCUSB adapter for the Meade Micro Focuser

• Various Lenses

• Celestron 6.3 Focal Reducer

• Various colored filters

• OIII Filter

• HA Filter

• GPUSB Shoestring adapter

• Thousand Oaks 11 inch Solar filter for the C11

• P4-2.8Mh with 200 gig drive and 1 meg of memory these are all networked to my computer in the house so I can remote connect and run the scope from in my house on winter nights when it is to Cold outside!!

• Software consist of Nebulocity capture software, MaxIm DL 4.61 used for guiding and photo processing, PHD Guiding Software from Stark Labs, MaxPoint, Photoshop CS3, NEAT filtering software, PemPro 2, Starry Night Pro Plus 6, Sky 6 and various other software.

Here are some pictures of my scope in the observatory.

Moonlight CST Focuser with Stepper motor controlled with FocusMax or MaximDL/CCD

    The Scope is mounted on a 4-inch diameter stainless steel shaft that has 2 6-inch plates mounted on each end and is attached to a concrete slab 3 feet deep x 2.5 feet in diameter with an 8-inch concrete shaft extending up 18 inches to just below the floor of the observatory and the pier is mounted to it. Meade Micro Focusers are mounted on the guide scope, controlled with a Shoestring FCUSB Adapter.