A decently dark site in a rural area has a sky background of about 21 mag/arcsec 2. In the Rocky Mountains in Colorado I’ve been to sites a bit darker than this, and it’s truly spectacular.

A truly dark night sky is getting harder and harder to find. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When I was a young boy growing ...

10 Night sky targets to celebrate International Dark Sky Week 2025 Night sky, June 2025: What you can see tonight [maps] From Leaping Leo to the Big Dipper: Here's how to see the bright stars of ...

Of course the sky is dark at night.” But that answer is wrong or, at best, incomplete, and the actual situation wasn’t obvious even to eminent scientists a century or so ago.

Each time we gaze up at the night sky, we take for granted that it's a pitch-black void studded with twinkling stars. This is called Olbers' Paradox, and though the idea was posed in the 1500s, it ...

The Cosmic Microwave Background. ... evolving, and with a finite age — are the reasons that we do not see light all around us and the night sky appears dark. Up Next Previous.