Posted on May 15, 2019
On this date in 2017, James Turrell opened the monumental art project he's been working on for more than 40 years to guests making big donations.
An art project called Roden Crater.
Roden Crater was a cinder cone - the remains of an ancient, extinct volcano - located in the Painted Desert of Arizona.
And it wasn't for sale.
This was back in the early 1970s. Artist James Turrell wouldn't take "no" for an answer; after working on the purchase for three years, he was able to buy Roden Crater. And then he was able to start building a naked-eye observatory for viewing the sun and the moon, winter and summer solstice, and other sky sights.What's the connection between a cinder cone and an observatory?
Turrell is utilizing the remote location as a way of gaining darker night skies than most of us are used to.
He's using the desert location as a way of gaining more sunny days and clear night skies than many other locations.
And Turrell is utilizing the inner cone of the crater as a way of focusing our sight of the wide Western skies into a smaller viewpoint, a more narrow aperture.
The observatory is not something that intrudes much into the desert landscape - it's what is called "minimally invasive" - and the tunnels and viewing spots inside the crater are specially engineered to create a truly different way of experiencing and seeing light.
Now, when I first discovered that such a cool naked-eye observatory was being built - and so near me! - I assumed that there were one or two viewing spots within the crater. But there are TWENTY-ONE! And it may be that Turrell is planning an eventual 23 different viewing spots, plus six different tunnels connecting them! You can browse some of these spots, right now, before the observatory opens to the general public some time in the next five years, on this website.
The lucky folks who already got to experience the Roden Crater had to pay quite a bit for their luck - they made $5,000 donations to Turrell's non-profit organization to fund further work. Some people kicked in another $1,500 for a hotel room, onsite dinner, and breakfast the following morning!
Check out this video and this other video on Turrell's Roden Crater project, and this video that shows one of Turrell's other works (also seen in the still photo below).
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