The Observatory Dome is Built

OK so it's only 20cm diameter and made of cardboard. But it is a prototype. me and Helen made this dome yesterday afternoon to prove if the concept of making a geodesic dome from plywood sheets would work. As you can see the final result looks dome like, it is fairly ridged apart from round the lower edge but then it is held together with scotch tape. The full sized one will also have a solid band around the bottom to support it and keep it round.
If you look on the inside you can see that it is made up of a number of triangles joined together in either hexagons or pentagons the gaps between each will not be as noticeable on the final thing as the measurements will be easier to get exact due to the fact that we will be dealing with something 10 times bigger.

The next thing to do on the model is to coat it with some papermache and then once dried I will then be able to cut the hole in it for the dome opening. In the full scale version it will have a coat of fibreglass for waterproofing. Once I have used this scale model to sort out some of the idea's I would like to be able to make a start on planning to build the observatory next year.