UNM-Taos Launches Cielo Centro: New Mexico's Largest Public Telescope, STEM Hub, and Dark‑Sky Initiative

Colin Nicholls still remembers being awoken in the pre-dawn hours of July 20, 1969, to watch the first moon landing on his family’s black-and-white television in central England. That moment inspired a lifetime’s passion for physics and astronomy, leading Nicholls to a degree from the University of Oxford and a career teaching math, physics and astronomy. Today he leads Cielo Centro, an educational observatory project at UNM‑Taos’ Klauer Campus designed to connect students and the public to the night sky and STEM careers.

Project Overview

Cielo Centro will be an astronomy center featuring an observatory building with a roll‑on/roll‑off roof, outdoor telescope pads, and an amphitheater for presentations and community events. Construction is divided into two phases. Phase One — an outdoor amphitheater financed with $2.5 million in public funds — broke ground on Nov. 21 and is scheduled to open next summer. The state allocated $1 million and Taos County voters approved $1.5 million via a general obligation bond.

Phase Two: Observatory and Telescope

UNM‑Taos is fundraising for Phase Two, which will add an observatory building expected to cost between $5 million and $6 million. Local donor Melissa King contributed a 36‑inch Dobsonian telescope with an F/4 primary mirror. That mirror gathers more than 23,000 times the light the human eye can detect, enabling views into deep space that will be accessible to students and the public once the instrument is upgraded for public use.

Accessibility and Local Collaboration

Volunteer engineer Phil Poirier of Bonny Doon Engineering is adapting the telescope’s housing and developing a custom periscope-style viewer so people with mobility limitations can use the instrument without climbing a ladder. Poirier and Nicholls have begun testing the design; Nicholls noted there are very few similar accessible viewers in the country.

Education, Workforce Development, and Partnerships

UNM‑Taos plans to host K–8 school groups, other colleges and the general public at Cielo Centro for star‑gazing nights and educational programs. Nicholls described a broader ambition to form a consortium with neighboring colleges to build a regional workforce development center tied to New Mexico’s growing space economy, helping rural students access courses and careers they might otherwise miss.

“The observatory really allows us to teach students in a manner where they're able to apply math and learn about the Earth outside the pages of a book,” UNM‑Taos Chancellor Mary Gutierrez said. “It makes learning real in a way it isn't when it's inside the four walls of a classroom.”

Dark‑Sky Protection

Nicholls serves on the council of Dark Sky New Mexico and emphasized that preserving dark skies is central to Cielo Centro’s mission. He and other advocates argue that New Mexico’s Night Sky Protection Act (1999) should be updated to reflect modern lighting technologies — for example, LEDs behave differently than the incandescent bulbs envisioned by earlier rules. On moonless nights in Taos County, the Milky Way and even the Andromeda Galaxy can be visible to the naked eye, illustrating why advocates want stronger, better‑enforced protections.

As fundraising continues for Phase Two, project leaders hope Cielo Centro will become both a community resource for star‑gazing and an educational pathway that inspires students to pursue STEM and space‑industry careers while protecting a valuable natural resource: dark skies.