Stargazing trips: the darkest skies, and when to go

Calculated 24 October 2026 with Astronomy Engine 2.1.19 (MIT licence).

A dark-sky trip is only as good as the nights you pick. The Moon decides most of it: around Full Moon even the best sky in the world looks washed out. We worked out, for five famous dark-sky places, the moonless weeks of the coming year and the months when the bright centre of the Milky Way is up.

A person standing in silhouette under the Milky Way, with a glow of town lights on the horizon
The Milky Way over the Trona Pinnacles, California. The yellow glow low down is light pollution from a nearby town. Photo: Ian Norman (http://www.lonelyspeck.com), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five places, and when the Milky Way is up

Bars: hours in a mid-month night when the centre of the Milky Way is at least 15° high in full darkness, for the next twelve months.

How to pick your dates

  • Go in the week around New Moon. Each place page lists the stretches of nights when the Moon is down for at least 80% of the dark hours.
  • The Milky Way’s bright centre has a season. In both hemispheres it is best seen from about March to September, and it climbs highest in the southern winter, from the Atacama, Namibia or New Zealand. From November to January it is up only in daylight everywhere.
  • Stay several nights. Clouds are the one thing nobody can calculate a year ahead.
  • Altitude helps. The Canary Islands and Atacama sites sit above much of the haze and low cloud.

How we worked it out

For every night of the next year we stepped through the dark hours in ten-minute steps and checked the height of the Sun, the Moon and the centre of the Milky Way. “Full darkness” means the Sun is at least 18° below the horizon. A night counts as moonless when the Moon is below the horizon for at least 80% of the full-dark hours and for at least 4 hours.

Sources

  • Our calculation, Astronomy Engine 2.1.19 (MIT licence), run on 24 October 2026.
  • Place facts are sourced on each place page.