Once we had the chairs out, Moe asked me whether I had ever been inside the white dome behind the high school.

I told him I had. Then I made him sit through the rest of it, which is what a man gets for asking me a question at four in the afternoon.

What Is the White Dome on Manford Avenue?

You have driven past it a hundred times. Up Manford, past the ball fields, sitting on the high school campus like somebody set it down and left. Most folks take it for a water tank and quit thinking about it.

It is a working observatory. There is a sixteen-inch telescope in there, on a mount worth more than my truck, standing on a pier of concrete and steel sunk separate from the floor so nobody's footsteps shake the picture.

Moe wanted to know who builds an observatory in a town this size.

That is the part worth the chair.

Why Does a Town of 6,000 Have an Observatory?

Mike and Carole Connolly lost their children Thomas and Christian in a traffic accident on July 2, 2005. Their daughter Michele Johnson lost her brother and her sister on the same day.

That is one sentence and it is the foundation's own wording, and it is all I am going to say about it. I do not know what the months after that sounded like in that house and I am not going to sit here and invent it for you.

What I know is what they did.

Mike had spent a working life as a thermal engineer, the kind of man whose job was keeping instruments from cooking or freezing on their way somewhere far off. He had spent a lot of nights outside with his kids and a telescope. That is a thing a certain kind of father does. And it is a thing a certain kind of kid remembers for good.

So the family decided their children's names were going to end up on a building where other people's kids could do the same thing.

Moe said that is a hell of a way to grieve.

I said it is a hell of a way to build a town.

How Do You Actually Get an Observatory Built?

They did not invent it from nothing. Down in Berthoud a nonprofit and a school district had gone in together in the late nineties and put up the Little Thompson Observatory on school land, raised by volunteers. The Connollys went and looked at it, then came home and worked out how to do the same thing here.

Here is the arithmetic, and it is about as Estes Park as arithmetic gets.

The Estes Park R-3 School District donated the land. A Connolly family bequest covered most of the construction. The Town of Estes Park put in a substantial share. Local businesses and individuals made up the rest. The Angels Above Foundation got its 501(c)(3) in January 2007, and the building went up across 2008 and 2009.

Then, once it was finished and standing and worth money, the family gave it to the school district and signed a long-term lease so they could keep running it.

Moe made me repeat that part.

They raised the money. They built the thing. Then they handed over the keys. The district maintains the building and pays the light bill. The foundation runs the programs and looks after the telescope. Nobody on that board draws a dime, and the board reads like something a city ought to have and does not: a retired science teacher with a doctorate, a retired nuclear chemist, a retired biochemist, an ophthalmologist, a lawyer.

What Do They Do With It?

Kids, mostly. That is the whole stated purpose, and I like how plain it is. Get children from kindergarten through twelfth grade interested in math and physics. Make it fun. Get them thinking about big things.

The telescope is a Ritchey-Chrétien, the same optical design Hubble uses. That sounds fancier than it is and I will not dress it up. The mount went in March 2014, the telescope in June 2015. The whole rig runs off a computer, and they can throw the view onto monitors in the warm room so thirty kids are not shoving each other away from one eyepiece.

Out front there is a human sundial, roughly 25 feet by 18 feet. You stand on the tile marked for the current month and your own shadow is the pointer. It reads standard time, not daylight saving. Which means for most of the year it will flatly contradict the phone in your pocket.

Moe asked which one is right.

The sundial is right. Your phone is doing arithmetic somebody voted on.

They run open houses with a lecture, and they pull real scientists up the canyon for it. Last August they had a scientist in who works on the Bennu samples from the OSIRIS-REx mission. Mike Connolly has said in interviews that he worked as a contracted thermal engineer on that same mission. A man who helped keep a spacecraft from cooking on its way to an asteroid, standing in a room he built, listening to somebody talk about the dirt it brought home.

The foundation's project page describes a student-built radio telescope called BERT, the Bobcat Engineered Radio Telescope, credited to a kid named Storm Wolf, and high schoolers working a near-Earth asteroid search under physics teacher Todd Burke. I could not turn up a word about either one outside that website, so take them as things the place has done rather than things happening now.

Why Does Any of This Matter Tonight?

Estes Park is working toward DarkSky International community certification. We are not there. There is a coalition, a lighting plan in review, and a sky brightness measurement event on September 8.

Connolly made the case for it to the Estes Valley Voice last November better than I could. He said almost everybody in town says they need the dark skies and appreciates them for what they can be. Then he said this: "If you don't have them, I think you don't know what you're losing, and that's really the truth."

That is the whole argument, from a man who knows something about losing things.

Can You Go See It?

You can, and it costs nothing. The open houses are free and run on donations and whatever they sell at the counter. Private sessions have to be booked by email at info@AngelsAbove.org, and they cap at fourteen, since that is how many bodies fit under the dome. Last night of the season is October 12. No August date was posted when I checked, so call ahead.

1500 Manford Avenue, on the high school campus, just north of the school.

One last thing, and it is my favorite part. That dome is sixteen feet across and it has to rotate to follow the sky. Connolly has said in interviews that it turns on a motorcycle chain pulled by two oversized garage door openers, the same trick they use down in Berthoud.

Men have sent instruments to Venus and out to an asteroid and back again. Up here, the roof opens with parts you could buy at any local hardware store.

Moe finished his coffee and asked whether the garage door openers came with a warranty.

I just rolled my eyes at him and finished my coffee.

This account draws from the Angels Above Foundation's own records, the Connolly family's July 2005 obituary in the Denver Post, Mike Connolly's on-camera interview about the observatory, the Estes Valley Voice's November 2025 reporting on dark skies over Estes, and current material from NASA and the National Park Service. The broad facts are solid. The family really did raise the money, build the thing, and then hand the school district the keys.