Go to the BAA Journal home page
J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 110, 3, 2000, p.164
Sky Publishing Corporation, 1999. ISBN 0-933346-94-8. Pp xv+240, $19.95 (pbk)
reviewed by Michael Hendrie
Leslie Peltier needs no introduction to older members. Starlight Nights was first published in the USA in 1965 and became available in the UK in 1967 when it was reviewed for our Journal by Patrick Moore. He called it a delightful book and so it is. Despite all the technical advances of the past 35 years, it is as fresh and stimulating today as it was then.
Leslie Peltier was born in 1900 on a small farm in Ohio and grew up with nature all around. There was no electricity, no running water, the summers were hot and the winters hard but it seems to have been a happy time for him. He recalls first noticing the Pleiades through the kitchen window at the age of five and his interest was later stimulated by the appearance in 1910 of first the Daylight and then Halley's comets. He already knew the brighter stars when at the age of 15 he acquired his first telescope, a small terrestrial refractor of 2 inches aperture bought with money earned by picking 900 quarts of strawberries. From then on his skill and persistence as an observer began to be recognised and he was given refractors of first 4, then 6 and later 12 inches aperture. With these telescopes he independently discovered twelve comets and six novae and made over 130,000 variable star observations.
Starlight Nights is the autobiography of a modest man whose considerable achievements as an amateur astronomer never destroyed his love of observing for its own sake. He retained his childhood fascination for the night sky and with other aspects of nature. The book gives a good account of life in rural Ohio before freeways, security lights and contrails, when he could see the Milky Way to the horizon and the zodiacal light was no stranger. Such skies were ideal for observing comets and faint variable stars. Changes to his environment came slowly at first but by the nineteen-sixties his old family farm and others in the area were floodlit and dark no more. Then he was glad to be observing from the relative darkness of his large garden on the outskirts of town. Some interesting personal photographs of Peltier, his wife and his observatories have been added to this latest edition, which also carries a foreword by David Levy who knew Peltier in his later life and visited him in Delphos where Peltier lived throughout his 80 years. But Peltier's text is unaltered and the pencil sketches he drew to head each chapter remain: these can only be described as delightful too.
I bought Starlight Nights when it first appeared and later found half a dozen copies remaindered on a station bookstall: over the years I have given all but one away. In 1962 I wrote a paper for the Journal on the distribution of comet discoveries and as it covered two of Peltier's comets I posted a copy to him at 'Delphos, Ohio, USA'. I had no reply (David Levy says Peltier did not write many letters) but five years later when I was reading Starlight Nights for the first time I was most gratified to discover that not only had he received the paper but that he must have read it too.
Starlight Nights is a gem. It is beautifully written in timeless English. It should be read by anyone interested in the night sky, or by anybody curious to know why an apparently sane relative or friend leaves a warm room on a frosty night, just to look at the Pleiades.
Go to the BAA Journal home page
Return to Journal 2000 June contents page