I have a place, I moved from in the last decade, the headquarters remnant of a once large mountain ranch, and I am kinda still wanting to sell it, located some 40 miles west of Denver in the mountains, and 20 some miles east of parts of the continental divide at about 8350 feet elevation and when it is clear, it is a fantastic, incredible sky. But the difficulty was when it was "not clear," there was a "pressure wave cloud," downstream in the flow of air across Colorado, easterly of the high divide where water vapor turns to ice or even droplets and hangs in and actually rolls in a distorted wiggly tube-shaped opaque cloud mass that wanders persistently along the east side of the continental divide and obscured my overhead sky for days at a time. Sometimes the tube of cloud will be a little east, sometimes a little west, but it hangs there in even a cold dry air regime. These are the clouds you see accumulating on the lee side, the protected side, off the east side of all high ground islands or land masses with wind flow generally from the west. Anyway, they make both fantastic sunrises and sunsets, and though, sometimes narrow, say 35 degrees of sky wide, most of the time they obstruct too much. No real significant detraction from solar, and this old property is wind-power-country on its west side. Okay. My sky and view of it was obstructed. A soul is not meant to be cut off from his sky. Where now I am, not far from where I grew up, the night skies are most often clear -- say like 310 nights a year or more. But on this globe, there are more than twice as many people than when I grew up launching dust and aerosols into the air , obscuring my remembered skies, which were crystalline heart-wrenching deep ultramarine skies at over 7500 feet; skies you could lose yourself in, skies through which you can see as far across the universe as light can travel. From this place, where I can stand outside, there is nothing but a clear bit of air between me, on the ground and the largest part of God's firmament surrounding Earth and Sun in a numinous and awesome connection with the vastness you can see, imagine, and feel. Oh yes, we are tiny and insignificant compared to something we can actually see that is three times as old as our star and its planets. That is the perspective I tried to recapture in returning "home." In addition to a solid place for my feet and the several telescopes, it is open sky.[img_assist|nid=302325|title=out my front door to the west|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=340|height=255] This is just a sunset from where I am now. In three hours the sky was clear for a million light years. I liked this sundown, and the farthest clouds visible are about 100 miles west. Although you really can't go home again, what is left of what I recall has been changed by staggering numbers of people and their effluents. AGW clearly has migrated clouds more often to obscure night visions, and perhaps the only way such a place could recover its existence would be if there were no people on the planet for two hundred thousand years. But for sky gazing and connecting with that inspiring sense of awe and wonder, that hinge to immensity and numinous -- this place is still far far better than most. (Making a living here is a different story, though this sunny place is high on solar and in flux and in 10 years I may not know the locale.) I often think that the high or moderate elevations of the Andes might still have the skies I seek. Those skies seen on the high slope might be those deepest blue nitrogen skies, those skies I have lost near home. I don't know. I am amazed at what you do see and are able to tell us about.