Nearly 50 years after Charles Ross began working on “Star Axis,” the artist’s gargantuan work in the New Mexico desert is nearing completion.
Bottom photo is of Ross on a boulder during the construction of “Star Axis” in 1982.
“Star Axis” itself is meant to embody an astronomical phenomenon called precession. First noted around 130 B.C. by Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer who is also credited as the inventor of trigonometry, precession refers to the top-like wobble of the earth’s axis due to the sun’s gravitational pull on the slightly bulging Equator. The result of precession is that while Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor, is currently the closest bright star to the northern celestial pole, that will change over time, as other bright stars from surrounding constellations happen to slowly become the polestar. (The entire cycle takes about 26,000 years.) “How could I not want to illustrate that,” Ross says. “How could I not want to find a way to walk through time?”
At the bottom of the stairs, you see through the porthole the sky more or less as it is today (actually, as it will be in around 2100, when, as it happens, Polaris and the pole itself will be perfectly aligned). But with each step (he commissioned professors from the University of Washington’s Department of Astronomy to date them in exact increments, one by one), the field of vision widens, tracking the change in Polaris’s orbit. And so, as you climb, you move through the earth’s 26,000 year precession. At the top, you glimpse the most distant past and future orbits of the polestar — the sky as it was at the beginning of the cycle, in 11000 B.C., and as it will be in A.D. 15000.
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