The Mountain Thread | Estes Park | August 12, 2026 |
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BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD
Moe pulled into my drive this afternoon with a folding chair and a thermos already in the bed of his truck. He did not have to tell me why.
Earlier today, on the far side of the ocean, the moon slid in front of the sun and took it out completely. People in Iceland stood and watched it happen. So did people in northern Spain, where it came late in their evening with the sun already low and not far from setting on its own. Nobody in Colorado saw a second of it. In this country the partial phases only reached as far as Alaska and New England. We get the better half of that deal tonight.
A total solar eclipse only happens at new moon, when the moon slides in between us and the sun. And a new moon is the darkest sky a person can get, since there is nothing lit up hanging around all night washing everything out. The same rock that blacked out the sun over Spain today is going to be nowhere at all after dark, on the one night of the year the Perseids are at their peak.
That is why this is landing in your inbox on a Wednesday afternoon instead of tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning would be too late to be any use to you. |
WHEN TO GO OUT TONIGHT
Now until about 9 p.m. Not much. The radiant point sits too low in the northeast to throw many your way. Eat dinner. 9 to 11 p.m. It starts. The ones you catch this early come in at a shallow angle and burn long, slow tracks across a lot of sky. Fewer, but the prettiest of the night. Midnight to 4 a.m. is the good one. Perseus climbs high in the northeast and the rate climbs with it. Under a clear dark sky the Perseids run 50 to 100 an hour. With clouds drifting through, figure 20 to 30. 8:53 a.m. Thursday is the actual peak, and the sun will be up by then. Which is exactly why the hours before dawn are the best of it. About the sky. Monsoon moisture is moving across the state. The northeast plains are forecast to be socked in. Up here the odds run better, and better still late, when breaks tend to open. No promises. This is Colorado in August. What you need: a blanket, a spot with no porch light in your eye, and 30 minutes without looking at a screen so your eyes can adjust. That is the whole list. What you do not need: a telescope. It sees too narrow a slice. Look up and look broad. They come out of the northeast but they cross the entire sky, so do not lock onto one spot. And no campfire out there tonight. Stage 2 is on. More on that below. |
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?Read More... |
Trivia Question❓Out front of the Estes Park Memorial Observatory there is a sundial where a person standing on it is the moving part. It keeps good time. But for most of the year it will flatly contradict the clock on your phone. Why? Answer at the bottom of the newsletter |
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RMNP UPDATE
If you sleep through tonight, Friday is the consolation prize. The last Astronomy in the Park of the season runs Friday, August 14, from 8:30 to 11 p.m. at the Park and Ride lot on Bear Lake Road. Free with your park pass, nothing to reserve, come and go as you please. Rangers open it at dusk and volunteers set up telescopes after. No timed entry permit is needed at that hour, since both permit windows close by six. Bring layers, a chair, and a red flashlight if you own one. The park's Night Sky Festival back in July pulled more than 3,000 people, so you will have company.
The fire ban is still on and it is the strict version. Stage 2 restrictions have been in place park-wide since June 29 with no end date announced. No campfires anywhere, charcoal briquettes included. Liquid gas stoves are out too. What is allowed is a twist-on butane or propane canister stove you can shut off, in developed campgrounds, picnic areas, and designated wilderness sites. Smoking only inside a closed vehicle or standing on pavement with three feet of clear ground around you. The Estes Valley Fire Protection District is at Stage 2 as well, so the rule does not stop at the park boundary. If you are sitting out in the dark tonight, that means no fire. Bring a jacket.
Mark August 24 through 30. The Colorado River Trail and the Grand Ditch on the west side close completely for a week so crews can treat the ditch to clear out non-native brook trout and make room for greenback cutthroat, Colorado's state fish. East Inlet, North Inlet, Tonahutu, Green Mountain, Coyote Valley, Onahu, and Timber Lake all stay open, as do the Holzwarth Historic Site and Harbison Meadows. |
DID YOU KNOW?
Tonight's dark sky and this morning's eclipse are the same moon. A total solar eclipse can only happen at new moon, and a new moon means no moonlight at all after dark. On August 12 the moon crossed the sun over Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, where totality came shortly before sunset. Nobody in Colorado saw a second of it. We got the other end of the bargain instead.
The Perseids are dust off a comet almost nobody alive will see. They come from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which takes roughly 133 years to get around the sun once. Every streak tonight is a piece of it hitting our air.
The elk you will be dodging next month all descend from 49 animals somebody shipped in. Elk were hunted out of the Estes Valley entirely by the 1880s. In 1913 and 1914, forty-nine were brought down from Yellowstone, two years before there was a national park to put them in. Meadow closures for the rut start September 1.
Estes Park is not a certified dark sky community yet, but it is working on it. There is a coalition, a lighting management plan under review, and a sky brightness measurement event on September 8. |
Joke Of The Day |
The observatory hired a new dome operator, but he kept getting distracted by the mountain views and forgetting to open the shutter. His performance review was not stellar. |
💡 Answer to Trivia Question: It reads standard time, not daylight saving.
The observatory's human sundial goes by the sun, and the sun has never once observed a time change. From March to November your phone runs an hour ahead of the shadow at your feet. The sundial is not broken. It is refusing to participate. |
UNTIL NEXT WEEK
Moe is staying out until two. I told him I would last until one, and we both know which one of us is lying about that.
Set an alarm for midnight. Go out, look northeast, and then quit looking at any one thing in particular. The sky is bigger than the part you are staring at.
There is more to the dome story than fit in here. How a family paid for that building and then handed somebody else the keys. What is actually inside it. And one detail about how the roof opens that I have not been able to stop telling people since I learned it.
"Stay smart, stay safe, and leave the mountains darker than you found them."
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.
- Buck Timber The Mountain Thread themountainthread.com/signup |