Charles Ross spent 50 yrs building Star Axis naked-eye observatory in New Mexico
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My parent's first date was going stargazing in the desert!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Star Axis, his largest project, was conceived in 1971
now it makes sense, groovy
Fast forward to 5:50 and the "groovy" comment will click in.
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
> 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.
FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky