alt.hn

7/22/2026 at 9:58:42 PM

Charles Ross spent 50 yrs building Star Axis naked-eye observatory in New Mexico

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/arts/design/charles-ross-star-axis-land-art.html

by ChrisArchitect

7/22/2026 at 10:48:18 PM

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.

by cratermoon

7/25/2026 at 5:00:00 PM

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.

by vjvjvjvjghv

7/25/2026 at 7:58:52 PM

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!

by dlivingston

7/25/2026 at 12:54:53 PM

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.

by ilamont

7/25/2026 at 2:23:09 PM

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.

by teraflop

7/25/2026 at 5:01:24 PM

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.

by vjvjvjvjghv

7/25/2026 at 1:22:13 PM

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”

by fathermarz

7/25/2026 at 5:22:26 PM

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.

by doodlebugging

7/25/2026 at 11:06:36 PM

What’s the feasibility of accurately carbon dating coca cola, modelo bottles and spray painted graffiti?

by SlightlyLeftPad

7/26/2026 at 5:01:18 AM

Over a 5000 year timeline I would hope that we would not lose the technology to carbon date artifacts. Maybe we lose all the context so that archaeologists can't know whether coca-cola or modelo were places, people, gods, or products. I'm willing to bet, if past performance is any indicator, that they would be identified as items related to cultural deities worshiped by those who consumed their deliciousness in rituals lost to time. Maybe even seasonal fertility rituals. Archaeologists have a tradition of just making shit up as they go and figuring it out once they have enough real data to lay all the speculation aside.

by doodlebugging

7/26/2026 at 6:34:42 PM

Behold the almighty light of Bud!

by SlightlyLeftPad

7/25/2026 at 6:17:45 PM

It’s concrete and rebar in the middle. This isn’t going to stand for 5,000 years.

by hinkley

7/25/2026 at 4:12:14 PM

Exactly. Egyptologists have long overlooked the “built by an obsessed artist” theory of the pyramids.

by antonvs

7/26/2026 at 9:13:17 PM

If you're doing the same job every day for dozens of years, that's a lot of time to figure out ways to do the work better.

But whatever they were doing was either so mundane or such a trade secret that they never wrote it down. But they did write down the quarrying and transportation process, so people tend to assume 'mundane' instead. One of the latest theories is cranes using workers as the counterbalance, just having them step on and off a platform to raise and lower the stones.

The pyramid is such a strange shape, which makes some activities that might tell us more about how they were made rather prohibitive. I expected them to find at some point evidence of a pyramid having its dimensions augmented partway through construction but nobody has claimed finding evidence of any such thing. One of the science Youtubers has a video that shows how just under half the volume of a martini glass is in the last 20% of the height.

So imagine you were an Egyptian ruler who has survived many many years, and you're looking at your tomb which is estimated to be finished sometime next year, and you asked the engineers if they couldn't add some more stone around the sides to make it 10% taller. They would look sideways at each other and then explain how many additional years it would take to do that, and wouldn't it instead be better to go for fancier cap stones, and artwork in the King's Chamber, which we have only just begun placing and would be easier to change? Maybe they would even have a little demonstration to show the volumetric difference between pyramids of closely separated dimensions, to save their literal necks.

by hinkley

7/25/2026 at 4:57:36 PM

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.

by vjvjvjvjghv

7/26/2026 at 9:15:01 PM

One of the pigments used for cave painting is also a really good natural sunscreen. So there is probably some truth to that.

Perhaps recorded exploits of either first successful hunts, or hunts that earmarked one of their number for leadership potential later in life. Little village princelings being lauded by their friends.

by hinkley

7/25/2026 at 1:42:21 PM

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.

by xtiansimon

7/26/2026 at 8:29:22 AM

Was wondering what this was all about and then visited the website

> Star Axis, his largest project, was conceived in 1971

now it makes sense, groovy

by KevinMS

7/26/2026 at 9:15:52 AM

https://vimeo.com/1120315498 - 6 min overview, from their website

Fast forward to 5:50 and the "groovy" comment will click in.

by eps

7/25/2026 at 3:15:05 PM

Abydos?

by fnord77

7/25/2026 at 11:31:30 AM

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

by ck2

7/25/2026 at 4:44:11 PM

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.

by natosaichek

7/25/2026 at 7:49:27 PM

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.

by antonvs

7/25/2026 at 3:21:34 PM

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.

by hunter-gatherer

7/25/2026 at 4:14:50 PM

Those mirrors will get so much pushback.

by UltraSane