Monthly Archives: October 2024

Read — Cheap Land Colorado

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This was an eye opening book by Ted Conover in 2022 about how cheap land plots were sold in the 1970s, and how they are still sold and used today.

There are plenty of other good book reviews, so I don’t need to rehash them here.

While I had considered getting some of that cheap land to use for astronomy viewing, I might reconsider after reading this book.

He does cover some of the advantages of viewing the night sky in the San Luis Valley a couple of places in the book. On page 177, Zahra Dilley arrived in Colorado, and she had never seen so many stars in her life. She was from the Chicago area, and she was used to seeing maybe one or two stars in the sky, not thousands. “I’ve been looking at the same star all my life. All my life. And I had no idea that Earth could look so freaking beautiful.”

On page 256, a friend of his (Lance) has a telescope and they looked at the Hercules Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy. I am guessing that he looked at M13 which is one of the best globular clusters in Hercules.

Anyway, it is a great book. If one is thinking of buying cheap land in Colorado, read this before you buy.

PS. Thanks to Vladimir for making the recommendation.

Finally read – Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer

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Why did I wait so long to read this book. Had I read this 35 years ago, it might have turned me into a variable star observer and comet hunter. (Leslie found at least 10 comets during his lifetime. Some say he found 12.) I am not sure how I could add to the plethora of 5 star reviews at Amazon.

In any case, I write these book reviews just so that I can remember that I read it, and what I particularly liked about it or found interesting. So, here we go.

Even though he was not able to graduate from high school (because he had to work on the farm while a brother was off in Europe for WWI) He seems to respect and encourage the academic pursuits of his wife Dottie, who had graduated from college during the mid-1920s.

The discussion of Native Americans was usually somewhat respectful, but there was a mention in the book about him being glad that he did not get scalped by an Indian for trespassing on their land. (Page 161.)

In the chapter where he and his wife went looking for native pots and fragments of evidence of life in a cave, I found this sentence odd. “Had we found the cave untouched we would have left it intact, for we well knew that many times important evidence has been destroyed by amateur explorers and souvenir hunters.” So, after seeing that much had already been dug into, they figured that most of the cave had already been dug up, so they could dig up some more to see what else they could find as “amateur explorers”? (Page 152.)

I am not sure that just because the cave was previously touched, that they should have felt confident in trying to find their own treasure, but the 1930s was a different time in the west.

It was interesting that Robert (Bob) Ingersoll was invoked on page 158. Maybe Leslie had an agnostic bent.

In chapter 20 on Mt. Locke, he took great pains to describe the steak that they purchased and cooked up for a guest of honor, Dr. Van Biesbroek. I was not surprised to learn that Van B was vegetarian, and he did not touch the steak. They could have asked him what he wanted for dinner. They just assumed that he would like what they wanted for dinner.

This is a great book, even though it is now 59 years old. I also like the inventiveness and ingenuity of his mind. The merry-go-round observatory should be a thing that is commercially made.