Cedar Key Milky Way
— the galaxy still rises here, straight out of the water.
Not only on a wall.
Cedar Key Milky Way, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Almost everywhere east of the Mississippi has lost the night sky. Cedar Key has not. The little Gulf town sits about an hour west of Gainesville with nothing between it and the horizon but open salt water, and on a moonless summer night the Milky Way's galactic core lifts out of the south above the channel markers. It is a Bortle 3 to 4 sky most of the year, the kind of sky a tripod and twenty seconds of exposure can hold. The crickets and the channel bell do the rest.
The place, in three passes.
Cedar Key is a Gulf-coast island town in Levy County, Florida, about 60 miles southwest of Gainesville and reached only by State Road 24 across more than twenty miles of salt marsh. The 2020 census recorded 687 year-round residents. To the south, west, and most of the north, the horizon is open salt water and federally protected wildlife refuge. There is no through traffic, no commercial airport, no high-rise lighting. The combination is unusual east of the Mississippi and is what gives the island its dark sky.
From late February through early October the bright galactic core of the Milky Way is above the horizon during dark hours. In Cedar Key the best viewing window is from roughly May through August, when the core climbs highest over the southern Gulf around midnight. Light-pollution measurements at the harbour put the sky at about Bortle class 3 to 4, dark enough that the core and the Sagittarius star clouds are visible to the naked eye on a moonless night. The new-moon weekends each month are the cleanest.
Public viewing spots on the island include the south end of Dock Street, the City Park beach, and the Cedar Key airport apron, which has the widest unobstructed horizon. The Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge, immediately north, has several pull-offs along Levy County Road 347 that face open salt marsh with no nearby road lighting. The Cedar Key Chamber posts a dark-sky observing calendar for new-moon dates. Bring a red flashlight to keep night vision and stay out of the working clam-lease channels after dark.
