Charles Ross spent 50 yrs building Star Axis naked-eye observatory in New Mexico
nytimes.com89 points by ChrisArchitect 3 days ago
89 points by ChrisArchitect 3 days ago
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ reports the area rates a 2 "average dark sky" on the Bortle scale, just short of an "excellent" score of 1. It's location halfway between Santa Rosa and Las Vegas, New Mexico is as far from populated areas as you might think.
I live in Albuquerque and within 2 hours you get the darkest skies you can imagine. Put that together with the average elevation and the dryness and the views are spectacular.
I grew up in southern NM, near White Sands, and the skies were so dark and vibrant that the Milky Way band is visible and prominent, and thousands of stars dot the night sky.
My parent's first date was going stargazing in the desert!
On a personal note I used to love stargazing in the mountains of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains as a child. Sort of lost some of the magic when I started needing to wear prescription eyeglasses.
And in 5,000 years, they will say. “They must have worshipped this star to create such a monument around it, showing how connected to the stars this ancient civilization was”
One man had this vision and has spent most of his life making it happen. It appears to be a durable structure.
Maybe it lasts 5000 years or more and when that day comes, their archaeologists analyze all the alignments, the structure, the context, etc and conclude that it must have been an important part of a society that valued science and technology. They study it and postulate that it was a gathering place for people to visit on important days and they look for dropped or discarded items trapped in small crevices in the rocks from which it is constructed so that they can date it and categorize the lifestyles of those who visited or worked on it.
I wonder if there are modern parallels, like with Chaco Canyon. Was that site the culmination of one man's lifetime dream to put the things that he noticed about his universe in perspective so that his neighbors and anyone else who passed through the area could hang out and drink the local drinks, hooting wildly as the moon appears in a stone portal on a certain day just as he had told them it would. "BYO refreshments", he told them. There isn't much out here but it will be worth it if you come.
Maybe all the medicine wheels we find across NAmerica where the work of one old, learned Johnny Appleseed Native American guy who liked to watch the skies and saw how things worked in cycles. Over time he shifted a few rocks around so that to an observer, they would align on important days of the seasons. Perhaps he calibrated his wheels by chipping spirals into stones to mark the edges of shadows so that he would know when a cycle ended and new one was beginning.
One day he started a long walk-about, traveling across the country and staying in one place for a few years, just long enough to move a few rocks around to fit the local alignments that he recognized and then moving on to a new spot to meet the start of the next cycle. Or, maybe he passed that knowledge on to his kids who continued the work once he had passed.
I'd like to be around in 5000 years to read the guidebook they create for a site like this, where so far anyway, it has near zero utility and exists as a local curiosity with limited accessibility.
It’s concrete and rebar in the middle. This isn’t going to stand for 5,000 years.
Exactly. Egyptologists have long overlooked the “built by an obsessed artist” theory of the pyramids.
I have similar thoughts about cave paintings and petroglyphs. Maybe they were done by graffiti teenagers and the elders were complaining about these young vandals.
Unfortunately, the article says that you basically need to be rich in order to experience this work of art: “Today, donors can pay a thousand dollars or more to visit with a small group, or sponsor a stair for six figures.”
It sounds like there may be liability issues as well for people visiting in the dark. The article mentioned the state legislature of New Mexico evaluated a plan to purchase it, but abandoned it.
The official website (https://www.staraxis.org/) has this to say:
> Fundraising is currently underway to complete construction this year and plan for the future of Star Axis. Star Axis will not open to the public for several years. Thank you for your patience.
> Your contribution to our fundraising campaign will provide opportunities for you to visit Star Axis between June and September 2026.
Which seems to hint that they're not planning to keep the current pricing model indefinitely. Hopefully it becomes more affordable once the construction has been fully paid for.
On the other hand, just looking at the pictures, it seems like the site might get pretty crowded if there were a significant number of visitors per day. So I guess there needs to be some kind of gatekeeping to prevent congestion. But maybe the remote location is enough to do that.
I don't think it would get too crowded. There really isn't much else going on in that area and not much population either.
Abydos?
good luck if that startup gets to put up hundreds of space mirrors for nighttime daylight
Dr.Becky had a good rant about it this week in the middle of her episode lol
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr52wOlyOaM
her knowledge + enthusiasm is infectious, love it
They're only shining on people who pay for it. I am opposed to light pollution, but reflect is not a threat to anyone who likes dark skies.
That’s easily refuted. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia, references are in the original page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflect_Orbital :
> A peer-reviewed study by the astronomer Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), published in Astronomy & Astrophysics in July 2026 identified Reflect Orbital's planned fleet as the brightest of the roughly 1.7 million satellites proposed by various operators.[18] An observer within a reflected beam would see the satellite shining about four times brighter than the full moon, although outside the beam, the satellite would be roughly as bright as the planet Venus.[18][39] With the full constellation of 50,000 satellites, ESO estimated the night sky would become three to four times brighter overall, and warned that illumination from a single mirror-satellite could ruin an exposure from a camera like that of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The crazy thing is that we'll all just continue to sit back and let these sort of things happen, only screaming to each other on the internet about it, doing little to nothing.