Sunspot Solar Observatory
— a white tower built to watch the sun.
Not only on a wall.
Sunspot Solar Observatory, 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.
“A working solar observatory at roughly 9,200 feet on Sacramento Peak, twenty minutes south of Cloudcroft. The Dunn Solar Telescope is the tall white tower visible from the road — a one-of-a-kind instrument that hangs from a single bearing and tracks the sun. The visitor center sits among ponderosa pine and the air is thin and clean. Most days the only sound is the wind in the trees and the occasional turn of the telescope.
The place, in three passes.
Sunspot Solar Observatory sits on Sacramento Peak at roughly 9,200 feet elevation, in the Lincoln National Forest about eighteen miles south of Cloudcroft, New Mexico. The site was established in 1947 by the U.S. Air Force and is operated today by New Mexico State University in partnership with the National Solar Observatory. Its signature instrument is the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope, a 136-foot white tower completed in 1969 that hangs from a single mercury-float bearing and rotates to track the sun.
The site was chosen for sky and air. Sacramento Peak rises above the Tularosa Basin, and the dry, stable air at 9,200 feet gives the telescopes long stretches of clean viewing. The Dunn telescope's optical path is held in a near-vacuum to keep heat off the image. From the visitor area the sun is just the sun, but the instruments are watching the chromosphere — the thin pink layer where flares and prominences live. The mountain is silent in the way only thin-air places are.
The Sunspot Visitor Center is open seasonally, generally spring through fall, with a self-guided walking tour past the Dunn and the older domes. A small entrance donation is requested. The road in from Cloudcroft is paved but winding, with sharp drop-offs and elk on the shoulder near dusk. Bring a jacket — at 9,200 feet the air is fifteen to twenty degrees cooler than the basin floor at White Sands. There is no fuel or food at the observatory; refuel in Cloudcroft.
