Denver observing chair

One problem with a dobsonian mounted telescope, like my Apertura AD10, is it's hard to be comfortable without a good chair.  A regular height chair is ok if you're looking at objects that aren't too high or too low in the sky.  If you want to observe something near the horizon, you really need to bend down.  And if you want to view something high in the sky, you'll have to stand up.  But for someone relatively tall, like me at 6'2", you can't stand up straight to observe, you need to bend down to reach the eyepiece.

The solution to this is an adjustable chair of some sort.  There are commercially made observing chairs, such as the one from OpticsMart, but they are quite expensive.  If you don't mind spending the cash, they are a nice way to go.  Something like a drummer's throne or shop stool would probably work as well, but you need to be sure they can go as high and as low as you need for observing.  Again, they cost money...

I decided to go the cheap DIY direction.  There are many designs online for observing chairs, and they aren't hard to make.  One I was considering was an observing stool.  A nice, simple design.  In the end I ended up building a design called a Denver chair, designed by Charles Carlson of the Denver Astronomical Society.  Click here to take you to the page with the design.

Here's how my chair turned out:

The design on the page linked above is very simple to build and well described, so I won't go into details here.  Be sure to find a nice straight, splinter free 2x4.  I did deviate slightly from the design.  Instead of the non-slip tread strip, I routed some 5/8" grooves along the back that the mounting bolt can slip into.  I made the grooves 3" apart.

As you can see, I also padded and covered my seat.  For the seat, I used a scrap of 3/4" MDF instead of plywood.

Since I covered my seat, beveling the back and having it ride against the front of the leg like the original design wouldn't work.  Instead, I beveled the piece of 2x4 on the bottom of the seat at the same 22 1/2 degrees as the legs and attached it flush with the back of the seat.  I then cut some pieces of rubber and screwed them to the back of the 2x4 to protect the finish of the leg.  For the rubber, I cut some pieces from a cheap rubber bungee cord.

When assembling the seat, be sure to add a spacer of some sort so the vertical plywood pieces are a bit wider than the 2x4.  Another option is to sand the sides of the leg a bit.  This is needed so the seat can slide up and down the leg easily.