Batman's or Iron Man's Backyard Observatory?

Imagine that you're an astronomy enthusiast with the financial resources of Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark -- what would you do to feed your hobby? Well, obviously you'd launch your own Hubble-esque space telescope, which is kind of ridiculous, so forget that. Okay, instead imagine that, rather than a billionaire, you're merely a millionaire with a passion for astronomy -- now what do you do?
Observatory Under Construction
The observatory under construction

Imagine that you're an astronomy enthusiast with the financial resources of Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark -- what would you do to feed your hobby? Well, obviously you'd launch your own Hubble-esque space telescope, which is kind of ridiculous, so forget that.

Okay, instead imagine that, rather than a billionaire, you're merely a millionaire with a passion for astronomy -- now what do you do? The answer in this case is to build an amazing backyard observatory, which is exactly what the father of a lucky 19-year-old Reddit user did.

The telescope required a crane to lift into place
The telescope required a crane to lower it into place

Kakon24 over at Reddit has posted a series of pictures detailing the construction of an incredible "backyard" observatory. As well, the Redditor took the time to answer questions about the telescope and related matters. And as you might expect, the Reddit discussion gets into plenty of technical detail for those interested:

With our equipment we can get 0.39 arc seconds per pixel which is 7x better than we are able to see due to our altitude.
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Yes, some serious kung-fu on the mirrors, which is what makes RCOS one of only a small handful that makes true RCs. The primary took over a year to make, and was finished using ionic milling to make the surface good to 1/40th of the wavelength of light on average.
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We use an APOGEE AFW50s-10 which is a 10 position 50mm sq filter with L, R, G, B, Ha, OIII, Sii, B, V and R filters. Last three are Johnson Cousins photometry filters and the three before that are narrowband for specific emission lines.

The telescope itself

Personally, I was most surprised by the measures required to clean the hardware:

They recommend spraying with frozen CO2 once a year or so if the mirror has only dust. You need medical grade liquid CO2 and a special spray gun designed for cryogenic gases. It comes out as snow flakes of pure CO2, which you spray directly on the mirror and runs off taking the dust with it, and then sublimates directly into CO2 gas.

The temp and humidity can change dramatically during an evening, even with the dome closed, and there can occasionally be condensation on the mirror that makes the dust and pollen adhere to the mirror surface that can't be removed using CO2. For that, we use a polymer cleaner than you spray on, let dry, then peel off.

If you are even remotely interested in astronomy, then do yourself a favor and check out the picture gallery of the observatory, and the Reddit discussion.