Hello. My name is Jeff and I am co-founder of Dark Dragons Astronomy. I absolutely love inventing things. Designing and building our own remote controllable ROR obsy was a very rewarding endeavor.
In order to support those who also love designing, making, innovating, helping, we decided to create this forum. A small corner of our hobby to discuss, share, improve the tech that all of us want and need.
At NEAF 2023 we brought a demonstration observatory to show off our soon to be released ASCOM Alpaca tech. It was the darling of our display, everyone wanted to know when it was going to ship, how much, when? That 6 foot square Mini Observatory built with standard dimensional wood lumber, using off the shelf components and a repurposed industrial strength drawer slides was a hit. Since what we took to NEAF was just for the show, we spent the following months on the design and iterations. Recently we installed that functional prototype in the backyard of our friend's home.
In the spirit of makers and DIY astro folks everywhere, we decided to share these designs with the community. Please take a look, help us improve this design so that astronomers everywhere can build their own MiniObsy wherever they have space to place it. And when your ready to automate it, Dark Dragons has the gear to make it an off grid capable, platform agnostic, fully remote controlled astrophotography observatory for the fraction of the cost of any dome.
We hope you will enjoy building it as much as we enjoyed designing it.
-Jeffrey Geiss, co-founder Dark Dragons Astro
