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The New Mexico Museum of Space History is perched where the steep foothills of the Sacramento Mountains are flattened by gravity and erosion. The building is flared at the base as if a rocket were hidden at its foot, ready to blast into the sky.
![A rocket launches vertically as a group of people with cameras and equipment observe from the ground, surrounded by smoke and a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/156109main_image_feature_644_ys_full-400x225.jpg)
By Loretta Hall New Mexico’s sky has always been captivating. Not only beautiful to look at, it was historically useful for predicting the changes of seasons for agricultural planning. A thousand years ago or so, observatories were built by the Jornada Mogollon people in the southeastern part of the state and the Ancestral Puebloans in the northwest.
