Mount Locke McDonald Observatory ridge
— a ridge of telescopes under the Milky Way.
Not only on a wall.
Mount Locke McDonald Observatory ridge, 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 6,790-foot ridge in the Davis Mountains, about 450 miles west of Austin and a long quiet hour north of Marfa. The domes belong to the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas, set on Mount Locke and the adjacent Mount Fowlkes. The air is dry and the night sky overhead is one of the darkest left in the lower forty-eight. On a clear winter night the band of the Milky Way reads as a real object, edge to edge, and the only city light is a faint glow from El Paso. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Mount Locke rises to 6,790 feet in the Davis Mountains of Jeff Davis County, West Texas, and is the home ridge of the McDonald Observatory, a research unit of the University of Texas at Austin. The observatory was endowed by a bequest from the Texas banker William Johnson McDonald and dedicated in 1939. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope, on the neighboring Mount Fowlkes, has an effective aperture of about 10 meters and was completed in 1997. The nearest town is Fort Davis, eighteen miles south down Texas State Highway 118.
The Davis Mountains sit in one of the least light-polluted regions in the contiguous United States. The observatory and Big Bend National Park together anchor the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve, certified by DarkSky International in 2022 as the largest dark-sky reserve in the world at the time of designation. The site averages roughly 240 spectroscopic nights per year. In winter the temperature on the ridge drops sharply after sundown and the air smells of piñon and grama grass. Coyote calls carry. There is no town glow on the horizon to the south.
The Frank N. Bash Visitors Center sits at the base of the road up to Mount Locke and is open most days for daytime solar viewing, guided tours of the Hobby-Eberly and Harlan J. Smith telescopes, and the observatory's signature Star Parties. Star Parties are run on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday evenings year-round and use a small fleet of public telescopes on a darkened deck. Tickets are timed and routinely sell out in summer. The observatory is about a 3-hour drive from El Paso or 6 hours from San Antonio; the closest lodging is the Indian Lodge in Davis Mountains State Park.
