StarDate is an astronomy magazine published by the McDonald Observatory, which is owned by the University of Texas. I've read it for years. It does a decent job of being interesting without being too technical. They also have a daily radio program you may have heard before.
A few months ago I got the May/June issue in the mail. It was the observatory's 75th anniversary, and the feature story was about how the McDonald Observatory was created. I didn't read it because, frankly, it looked boring. It wasn't about astronomy. So I skipped it.
However, a month or two later, I found myself sitting down and reading the article. Turns out, it was way more interesting than I thought, and it even had a Chicago connection! I was quite glad I took time to read it.
So here's the scoop:
In the 1920's, there was a Texas millionaire, William McDonald, who died and bequeathed all his money to the University of Texas to build an astronomy observatory. His relatives, though, were aghast that they wouldn't receive any of his money, so they sued, claiming he was of unsound mind when he made the will. The verdict went one way, the appeal went the other way, and after round three ended in a tie, a settlement was reached: the relatives got some of the money, but the university got most of it.
But, there was another problem: the university had the money for an observatory, but not the manpower. It had no astronomy program, and on the entire campus there was only one astronomer: the president. Their best plan was to invest the money until it grew large enough to hire a staff. This is where the Chicago connection came into play, thanks to Otto Struve, a fourth generation Russian astronomer.
Struve was the head of the University of Chicago's astronomy department, and also the head of the Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin. (The observatory is still there, by the way; Wendy and I toured it several years ago after I learned about it in the footnotes of an old science fiction novel.) Struve had the opposite problem that Texas did: he had a large staff and faculty, but his observatory was becoming obsolete, and was in a poor location for viewing the stars. So when he heard of Texas' situation, he offered a deal: if they built the observatory, he would provide the staff and funds to operate it. Apparently such collaboration was unheard of at that time, but it solved a problem for both universities, so Texas eagerly accepted, and in May of 1939, the McDonald Observatory was opened.
Those were the most interesting parts of the article. It was fun to make the connection between the Yerkes observatory, the StarDate magazine I read, and the McDonald observatory. I've never been to McDonald; it's located near Fort Davis, TX, deep in the southwest corner of the state. Someday I hope to take a trip down there to see it.