Charles Ross Builds 400-Acre Star Axis to Track Earth’s Celestial Axis

Q: After five decades of work, will this desert pyramid finally open to reshape our perception of time?

Yes—if Charles Ross meets the timetable he described, **Star Axis** is expected to open after more than 50 years of work, and it is explicitly designed to alter how visitors experience time. The New Mexico earthwork is not just a sculpture but a functioning naked-eye observatory. Its central “Star Tunnel” is aligned with Earth’s celestial axis so visitors can watch Polaris through a circular opening and grasp the slow 26,000-year precession cycle—the wobble that changes the identity of the North Star over millennia. Ross’s aim is to make deep time physically legible, turning an abstract astronomical process into something people can walk through and see. That is what makes the project unusual even among major land-art works. Ross, now 88, began searching for the site in 1971 and secured roughly 400 acres in 1975 from rancher W.O. Culbertson Jr. He has spent decades building a stepped, pyramid-like structure on a remote mesa in northeastern New Mexico, drawing on mathematics, astronomy and the monumental traditions of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. Whether it truly reshapes public perception will depend on access and reception once visitors can enter it. But the evidence suggests that is precisely its purpose: to move people beyond human-scale time and into planetary and cosmic time. If completed and opened as planned, Star Axis would stand as one of the rare artworks that lets people experience thousands of years of celestial change from a single place.

2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jul 22

At 88, Charles Ross is drawing fresh attention for “Star Axis,” a monumental earthwork in northeastern New Mexico designed to let visitors observe Polaris along Earth’s celestial axis.
The project functions as both observatory and pyramid, visualizing how the north star’s position changes over deep time so viewers can imagine the sky as earlier civilizations saw it.
Ross, a math-trained land artist, spent four years searching the Southwest before securing the site in 1975, when rancher W.O. Culbertson Jr. deeded him about 400 acres from a 62,000-acre property.
The work places Ross among the last major figures of the land-art generation that left galleries for vast outdoor sites, using landscape itself as the medium.