Every Old West town had saloons and bawdy houses. How many, though, had an observatory? Del Norte, the southern Colorado mining town near the San Juan Mountains, was home to an 1885 observatory built on Lookout Mountain by the Presbyterian College of the Southwest. Its telescope—9.5 inches in diameter—was one of the largest west of the Mississippi. The San Juan Prospector described it as a “monster in comparison to those of other observatories.” Today’s Lookout Mountain Observatory
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