Big Bend National Park night sky
— the darkest sky in the lower forty-eight.
Not only on a wall.
Big Bend National Park night sky, 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.
“Big Bend was designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2012, and remains one of the least light-polluted places in the continental United States. On a moonless night the Milky Way casts a faint shadow. The Chisos throw a black silhouette against the band of stars, and the desert below holds the dark in a way that takes a long minute to adjust to. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Big Bend National Park sits in Brewster County, Texas, roughly 230 miles from the nearest commercial airport at Midland-Odessa and well over a hundred miles from any sizable town. The park covers about 801,000 acres along the Rio Grande and reaches from a desert floor near 1,800 feet up to Emory Peak at 7,825 feet. The combination of distance from urban centers, dry desert air, and elevation creates the dark, transparent sky for which the park is known.
Big Bend was certified an International Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association in 2012. Light-pollution measurements regularly place it among the darkest sites in the contiguous United States, with sky-quality readings reaching the Bortle Class 1 range used to describe pristine night sky. The nearest large source of urban light is Midland-Odessa, more than 200 miles to the north. On clear moonless nights the Milky Way is bright enough to cast a faint shadow on pale ground.
The best stargazing months are October through April, when the air is dry and nights are long. The park asks visitors to use red-filtered lights and to avoid white headlamps at popular viewing areas including the Chisos Basin, Persimmon Gap, and the river road near Santa Elena. The Milky Way core is most prominent from late spring through autumn, rising in the southeast and arcing high overhead by late evening. Rangers occasionally host astronomy programs at the Basin amphitheater.
