About the name

The Observatory is named after the saw-mill "Schorenmühle", which stood in the Rottach valley, between the villages Petersthal and Moosbach near Sulzberg in Oberallgaeu.

In the late 1980's the river Rottach was dammed to construct a reservoir, and the valley including the mill was flooded.

Nowadays I enjoy sailing over the sunken mill (SSGR).

See here for live webcam image and weather info  of lake Rottach.

The picture shows a plan of the Rottachsee reservoir drawn on a 1985 aerial photo (courtesy Erwin Hoesle). The mill is near the centre, at the three-forked road leading to the villages of Moosbach (top left), Untermoos (top right) and Petersthal (bottom).  <click picture for full resolution>

The observatory is a private garden observatory. Actually the permanent hardware is rather humble: it just consists of a permanent pier.

The EQ-6 and telescope are mounted every observing night.

The current working horse is a Celestron C9.25 with the homebuilt SMAGS classical grating spectrograph (see SMAGS sites on the menu at left).

As secondary instrument there is an INTES MK-66 15cm telescope with the homebuilt SMEtte Spectrograph (prototype). The prototype SMEtte is rigidly connected to the telescope and cannot be interchanged easily.

Before the 5" pier (which was constructed by Brian from Astroparts who had a similar 4" one on display at the ATT which I liked because of its functional design and reasonable price - thanks Brian, it works very well!) I had the MK-66 on a portable Losmandy GM-8 mount.