Finding Dark-Sky Sites

When to use this

During trip planning — light pollution is a property of the location, not the night.

• Booking a camping trip with stargazing as the focus
• Choosing between two equidistant campgrounds
• Setting kid expectations about what the sky will look like

See it done

What you need

• lightpollutionmap.info or DarkSky International park finder
• Your candidate campground’s coordinates

Step by step

1. 1.Open lightpollutionmap.info and search for the campground name or drop a pin at its coordinates. The color overlay shows the Bortle scale rating: white/red is heavily polluted, gray/black is dark.
2. 2.Bortle 1–3: Milky Way visible naked-eye, faint constellations visible, the Andromeda Galaxy is a clear smudge. The kind of sky most people have never seen.
3. 3.Bortle 4–5: major constellations clearly visible, faint ones washed out, Milky Way visible as a band but not detailed. Most rural campgrounds.
4. 4.Bortle 6–7: only bright constellations and planets visible, Milky Way invisible. Suburban-edge campgrounds.
5. 5.Bortle 8–9: only the brightest stars and the moon. Inner-city sky.
6. 6.For a camping trip with stargazing as the goal, target a Bortle 4 or darker site. Bortle 3 or darker is genuinely transformative.
7. 7.DarkSky International maintains a list of certified Dark Sky Parks and Sanctuaries — these are the gold standard. Big Bend NP, Death Valley NP, Cherry Springs SP (PA), Natural Bridges NM (UT), Acadia NP, and most of the Desert Southwest are excellent.

Pro tips

• A new-moon weekend at a Bortle 3 site is the same sky humans saw for 200,000 years before electricity. Worth planning a trip around once.
• Elevation matters too — a 6,000-ft Colorado site is darker than a sea-level Texas site at the same Bortle rating, because there’s less atmosphere overhead.

Common mistakes

• Assuming "national park = dark sky." Some popular national parks (Yosemite Valley, Zion main canyon) are surprisingly bright due to ranger station and lodge lighting. Check the map.
• Ignoring local horizon glow. A Bortle 3 site 30 miles from a city still shows a glow in the city’s direction — face the opposite way for the best stargazing.

Analog companion

Prefer the full landing page first? See the northern hemisphere constellation wheel.