Hey all,
We just sold our CDK14 System in New Mexico at HCRO. We sold the system because we want to expand our reach in the Southern Hemisphere with more offerings in terms of FOV and different optical offerings (refractors and mirror scopes).
Since I was a strong proponent of HCRO at its earliest time, and I believe HCRO is a much better company due to that early influence, I wanted to share a quick retrospective for current and perhaps future tenants at the site.
This has nothing to do with Dark Matters Astro as a business at all. I just want to make that perfectly clear. With that said, here are some thoughts:
The site at HCRO is well engineered. The observatories Greg has built there are made incredibly well, and I even had the chance on multiple trips to talk to the men working on building them. Not only did Greg not skimp at all, the people that worked on those buildings cared too. It showed both in terms of the output but also how they were very invested in the design, gave feedback to Greg about ways to make new buildings even better, etc. If you are thinking of moving there and have reservations of the physical state of the facilities — don’t worry about that at all. They are first class and Greg treats them as such with great levels of responsibility.
I am not sure the roof open/close paradigm at HCRO is properly suited to the environment. There are times I feel the roof closes too easily and times where I feel it closes far too late. I live in Seattle though and am used to the most chaotic weather in the US (I am sure my friends in Germany feel the same) but something doesn’t rub me the right way in terms of the roof operations. I have given some feedback on this, and Greg has been amicable to a degree on this. I still don’t feel like they have the right params though, since I also run a system at Obstech that literally does this perfectly. So maybe it’s a learning process, or some different tech should be used at HCRO to make this more of a polished experience.
The seeing in Pie Town is EXCELLENT most of the time. If you are deployed to other places in New Mexico like Rowe or Animas, then you are in for a treat if you move to Pie Town. The WORST nights in Pie Town are the same as the BEST times in Animas and Rowe. This is not very surprising though as the NASA VLA is not far from this location.
Overall, my experience at HCRO was very good. For a North American site it is quite good. While I didn’t mention the Monsoon Season directly here — I would offer this instead. The number of nights clear here at HCRO are higher than average for NA sites. The winters are EXCEPTIONALLY good, the spring isn’t that bad, the summer can be a bit limiting at times due to the Monsoon Season, but overall I think it is a great place to run a scope — since when it needs to be BEST (winters, longest nights) it is legendarily good.
Hope this prose helps some people.
Cheers,
Bill Long
