Gunnison
Like small-town boosters everywhere, gas-station owners Tom Willis and Tod Vandewalker liked to think up pie-in-the-sky schemes to pump new energy into the local economy.
They once explored the notion of building a tourist railroad from Gunnison to Crested Butte, only to scuttle the idea after realizing it would cost $1.5 million per mile – as much as the county’s total annual sales-tax revenue.
But when the friends proposed that the Western Slope community put in what they touted as “Colorado’s largest telescope,” things started looking up.
“Neither one of us is an amateur astronomer. I don’t know my asteroid from a hole in the ground,” says a joking Willis, 53, a guitar-playing grandfather who runs a Phillips 66 outlet on the west edge of town. “But we thought a free, public observatory would be a way to take advantage of our clear skies and clean air, and bring more people to town.”
Adds Vandewalker, 59, a former traveling salesman whose BP store faces the Wal-Mart on the north end: “We talked to business leaders, state and local government people and the school districts, and nobody thought it was a bad idea.”
That was about four years ago. Now, thanks to the initiative of these two “ordinary guys,” coupled with support from a few big donors and hundreds of
small ones, the town of 5,400 is on the verge of unveiling what could become the brightest star in Colorado’s growing constellation of serious sky-watching facilities.
The Gunnison Valley Observatory (coloradoskies.org), at an elevation of 7,700 feet and boasting a magnifier big enough to rival many used in academic settings, is expected to be up and running by early 2006.
“I would call it one of the more significant installations in Colorado,” says Robert Stencel, director of the University of Denver’s Chamberlin Observatory.
Housed in a new building just off a paved county road about 2 miles south of Gunnison, the 30-inch scope will be available for use by school groups, college students, townspeople, tourists and researchers who may access it via the Internet.
“I think it’s way cool,” says Kimberlee Douglass, 51, a student at Western State College in Gunnison. “I know quite a few of the constellations, and it’s fascinating.”
Richard Vesely, a builder and 20-year Gunnison resident who confesses he’s not much of a stargazer, views the observatory as “a good thing” nevertheless.
“If you’re not an outdoors person, what you’ve got here is minimal,” he notes. “We’ve just lost our movie theater, so this will be another thing to do for the whole family, with no age limits. Plus, it’s low impact.”
In Gunnison, a town so small the Safeway is a block from the rodeo grounds and so friendly a stranger can get a wave from a gravel-truck driver, almost everybody knows about Willis, Vandewalker and the nonprofit they formed to bring their dream to fruition.
“They kind of captured the imagination of the county,” says Gunnison County manager John DeVore, an early advocate of the project. “And now that they’ve got the building up, people are beginning to get more excited.”
Promoters envision the observatory not only as a place for “star parties,” but as the launchpad for a science-and-technology center to be developed in collaboration with Western State and other local interests.
Meanwhile, Willis hopes it will give young visitors the kind of “wow” experience he had in the days of space exploration in the ’60s, when he visited the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles as an eighth-grader.
“All of a sudden I realized that I was on this little ball in this vast universe, going around at thousands of miles an hour,” he recalls.
“It made me hungry to learn, and what it did to me is what I want to pass on to kids here. They’ll be able to stand and see Mars or Venus or Saturn. Some kids will blow it off, but some will take the experience home and tell Mom and Dad, and those are the ones we want to reach.”
The telescope, a reflector-type device about the size of a large water heater, will be housed in a metal dome 20 feet in diameter and shielded from ambient light sources by a circular berm about 18 feet high.
“It’s an ideal location,” says Paul Van Slyke, a Colorado Springs engineer and machinist who built the instrument. “To observe clearly, you’ve got to get away from the lights of the city, unless you just want to look at planets and the moon. With Gunnison’s dark skies, people should be able to see galaxies, nebulas, star clusters – just about everything that’s up there.”
Vandewalker, who hit on the idea of an observatory one night while gazing at the Milky Way from his front porch, says “our stars are so clear, some nights they don’t twinkle” – which is good, he adds, because it means the air is not only clean, but extraordinarily stable, with no atmospheric disturbances to distort the images.
The Gunnison telescope, now being upgraded with new electronics and software, was built to observe Halley’s Comet in 1986. It anchored Van Slyke’s nonprofit Black Forest Observatory until 2001, when he closed it and put it up for sale to devote more time to making telescope accessories.
Willis found the 1,600-pound instrument advertised on the Internet, and he and Vandewalker arranged to purchase it for $110,000, more than half of which was raised through a series of benefit auctions, garage sales and similar events.
“That’s a pretty significant amount in a town this size,” says banker Woody Duncan, who displayed the scope in the lobby of his building for two years to spur interest in the project.
In addition to individual donations, the Gunnison Valley Observatory received a $25,000 grant from the local Rotary Club and $10,000 each from the city and the county. It also won a $150,000 economic-development grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs to help pay for site work and construction of the 800-square-foot observatory building.
The 5-acre site, donated by Gunnison County, was carved out of a gravel pit near the base of “W” Mountain, known for the huge white letter it brandishes in honor of the college. Businesses and service clubs offered in-kind labor and materials.
Operating expenses are expected to be covered by donations, fundraisers and proceeds from the sale of bottled water called Gunnison Skywater (“as clean and clear as our Colorado skies”).
“I buy it all the time – not because it’s the best water, but just to support it,” says Paul Jacobs, the owner of a carpet store whose back wall sports a mural that pitches the telescope to motorists on U.S. 50.
“I think it’s neat,” he says, “and I’m hoping it creates more interest in exploring our universe.”
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
Powerful telescopes abound in Colorado
The centerpiece of the Gunnison Valley Observatory is a custom-made telescope incorporating a 30-inch f/9 Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain optical system manufactured by Intermountain Optics of Salt Lake City.
With a focal length of 270 inches (30 times 9), it is only a little less powerful than the historic 20-inch f/15 Alvan Clark refractor in Denver’s Observatory Park, which has a focal length of 300 inches.
The strongest in Colorado, says University of Denver astronomy professor Robert Stencel, is DU’s twin 28-inch f/21 apparatus atop Mount Evans, with a focal length of 588 inches.
For a detailed description of the Gunnison scope, go to obser
vatory.org/install.htm#return2. For a directory of the roughly 60 other Colorado observatories, go to cleardarksky.com, click on “clocks” and scroll down to the browse listings.
Gunnison isn’t the only game in town. Elsewhere on the Western Slope, another public observatory is taking shape on the grounds of West Grand High School in Kremmling, featuring a 16-inch reflector scope donated by the University of Denver.
“Our hope is to put out a barbecue after football games and track meets and have an astronomy party for the whole community,” says science teacher Kevin Jarigese, who is spearheading the project.
Amateur astronomy clubs throughout the state generally welcome guests at “dark sky” viewings where members set up their own telescopes, some so large they may be hauled in on horse trailers. For links to club websites, go to astroplace.com and click to “Colorado.”
On the Front Range, space enthusiasts also can go to such facilities as DU’s Chamberlin Observatory (denverastrosociety.org), which offers public viewings most Tuesday and Thursday nights and will have an open house starting at dusk Saturday; the University of Colorado’s Sommers-Bausch Observatory (lyra.colorado.edu), which is open most Friday nights; and the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthoud (starkids.org), which can be reserved by school and family groups and has public sessions on the third Friday of the month.
-Jack Cox
