Canal Museum dedicates Merry Go Round observatory

Nov. 14—DELPHOS — Amateur Astronomer Leslie Peltier was a pretty big deal for the City of Delphos.

On Saturday, the Delphos Canal Museum dedicated a replica of his telescope setup.

"He is quite famous in the astronomy world and he's also a guy from Delphos with a 10th-grade education who just had a curiosity about the world and went on to do great things, become an astronomer," said Bob Ebbeskotte, museum board member. "He discovered 12 comets, six novas. He made 132,000 variable star observations and he introduced a lot of people to the art of astronomy."

Putting together a replica of Peltier's Merry Go Round observatory wasn't all that easy.

"So gathering pictures and documents and that kind of thing was a bit of a challenge at times," Ebbeskotte said. "We had a couple of people that saw the original and they tell us we built it in the exact same way that Leslie did, just out of pieces he found here and there at the farm and junkyards and just put it together to make it work."

Peltier, who was born on January 2, 1900, worked on his father's farm and picked 900 quarts of strawberries at two cents a quart to raise the $18 he needed to buy a telescope from a mail-order company. That telescope is affectionately known as the "Strawberry Spyglass."

It was on November 13, 1925, when Peltier spotted his first comet.

Much of the information museum board members received in building the observatory came from Peltier's book, "Starlight Night." But it wasn't all that helpful initially.

"It was about six feet square, about five feet tall. So what we had to do is a little research. We have little descriptions here, an artist's rendition of what they thought it looked like and we had some pictures to go by," said Steve Dorsten, president of the Delphos Canal Commission. "It was something we had to do a lot of research into. Overall it just came out to be a great finished product. So we're very pleased with it."

The original Merry Go Round observatory was restored by the Miami Valley Astronomical Society and sits at John Bryan State Park, near Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Reach Sam Shriver at 567-242-0409.