Since I now have a thermometer, I continually look for things to measure.

I noticed my telescope's two 1-centimeter thick 30by30 cm large pier mounting plates get baked in the day. My partly completed observatory has no roof yet. The only protection the pier has again the elements are 2 layers of plastic.

So I measured the top plates' temperature at noon: 37.3 degrees Celsius - temp in rest of observatory: 29.3 degrees - massive 8 degrees difference.

I made a rough 2-layer carton sun shield to cover the steel plates. One day later I measured the temp at noon again: steel plates: 29.8 Celsius, observatory: 29.3 - a minor 0.5 degrees difference.

So my cheap carton sunshield cut the temp difference from 8 degrees to 0.5 degrees - a MASSIVE improvement. And it is nearly winter here, so in summer I assume there would have been a larger difference.

Surely this will help the observatory to cool down faster.

Since the telescope is mounted directly onto these plates, at the start of each evening up until now the bottom part of the telescope tube OTA gets heated until the steel plates are cooled to ambient temperature.

This was really bad, since the telescope is supposed to be allowed to cool down quickly, and my oversight caused it too be heated by two wide, and thick sunbaked hot plates directly beneath it.

So I solved a serious image quality degrading problem I was unaware of cheaply and quickly..

Hmmm, what can use the themometer for next ...