Le Sueur Manufacturing Company was started in Birmingham, Alabama, by Jack E. Le Sueur, in the late 1940's. It began on a kitchen table with the building of electronic controls for industrial applications. Beginning in the steel and aircraft industries, it progressed into the concrete industry where a product line was developed for electronic moisture controls, sensing electrodes, and verification equipment.

Sam Le Sueur, son of Jack and who would become president of Le Sueur Manufacturing Company in the mid-1980's, took an interest in astronomy in 1963 at age five, and has held this interest all of his life.

By 1991, Sam Le Sueur's interest in astronomy included not only observing, but also astro-photography. One night, after having perfected the alignments in latitude and azimuth on the homemade, six-inch f15, telescope, he began photographing M-42. Midway through the photograph, in the dark, someone tripped over a tripod leg. At that point, he knew there must be a better way. Amateur and professional astronomers using small telescopes (6" to 16") needed an economical way to temporarily or permanently mount their telescopes, perfectly aligned.

After an exhaustive search for a permanent mounting pier, to no avail, in 1994 he built a prototype pier. Sam's photography skills soared immediately. He attributes this instant success solely to the fact that the pier was built using the standards he learned from his lifetime experience in the heavy equipment industry. Because in this industry, everything is built twice as good as it needs to be to eliminate possible failure.

So began the Astro Pier™, filling the need for a heavy-duty, permanent, telescope-mounting pier.