LAFAYETTE — Spencer Jones made a left-hand turn in the suburban night Friday and came upon the bluish glowing orb. His eyes indeed did not deceive him.

“I saw it coming down the street, and I said, ‘No way, that’s the house I’m delivering to!’ ” said Jones, of Orinda, driving up with a Patxi’s pizza to the home of Colby and Julia Powell. He flashed his small “Star Wars” key chain as proof of his love of The Force, and looked back up at the roof. “Man, that’s awesome!”

The 23-foot replica Death Star battle station atop the Powell house was a “labor of fun,” Colby Powell said, using PVC-pipe sections, two military parachutes and an array of LED lights to create a long-dreamed-of but only recently assembled Halloween tribute to the movies most members of the Powell family love. And now, Powell said, the plan is to leave it on the roof through mid-December, to help usher in the planned Dec. 18 release of the new Star Wars film “The Force Awakens.”

The Death Star idea first surfaced two years ago, he said, “but we couldn’t conceive of how to execute it,” and the idea languished. Then this past summer, three of the Powells’ four kids said they wanted to be Star Wars characters for Halloween — Isabelle was Princess Leia, Drew was Chewbacca and Ian was the robot R2D2. After that, Colby said, “We decided to go ‘thematic,’ and we revived the Death Star idea.”

And they went big. Using 2,000 feet of half-inch-thick PVC pipe and 162 joiners, the star’s “skeleton” was built in two sections, over several weeks in the Powells’ driveway.

“The trickiest part was then, ‘What do we cover it with?’ And it needed to be gray,” Powell said. The answer was two military surplus parachutes purchased on eBay, which he said have worked better than he could have dreamed.

“The (LED) lights show through them, and there’s this eerie glow” with which he’s very pleased. The Death Star’s superlaser, capable in the Star Wars canon of destroying unfriendly planets, is represented with green LED lights.

After the two halves were combined at ground level, the 400-pound ball was lifted into place with a large construction crane, at his disposal through his job as a vice president with Menlo Park-based Overaa Construction.

The rest of the costs were minimal, Powell said. “I had no idea how much a parachute would cost, but on eBay, they were less than $100.” More important, each turned out to fit perfectly around the skeletal half-orbs in the driveway.

Unlike in some neighborhoods where large Christmas-oriented light shows or other attention-commanding displays can make some bark like Chewbacca, neighbors have been “amazingly supportive” during various phases of the Death Star’s construction, Powell said. And on a recent Friday night, every five minutes or so, a resident or visitor to Glen Road — essentially a long cul-de-sac — pulled over to admire the Empire’s ultimate weapon.

“It’s humongous!” said 8-year-old Jace Canter, in the car with mom Sara and older sister Kate.

Added Sara Canter, “We saw it on Facebook and wanted to find it for ourselves … I love it; stuff like this is really fun, and I love that about where we live.”

The Death Star can be disassembled and stored, Powell said. There are no firm plans for future Halloweens, but … “if someone has a good idea for a Star Wars thing, and I could help out with that, I’ll probably break it out.”

Contact Sam Richards at 925-943-8241. Follow him at Twitter.com/samrichardsWC