Plan Your Stargazing Trip Today! [A Complete Guide]

It can be very easy to get caught up in a routine in our day-to-day lives. While a routine can bring comfort and familiarity, occasionally breaking from that routine and doing something different can have an incredible effect on our sense of motivation and enjoyment of the little things. For me personally, there are few activities that can provide such a fulfilling break from routine as a stargazing trip to a dark site. Not only does this provide a great change of setting, being an unfamiliar and exciting experience, but it also helps to grant some perspective and quiet time away from city life. In this post, I’ll take you through the steps to plan your next, and perhaps your first ever, stargazing trip!

Picking Your Location

You don’t necessarily need to find a dedicated dark site to enjoy a good stargazing trip. You simply need to check a light pollution map to find somewhere relatively near you that will be suitable for your expedition. I find this light pollution map very useful when planning my trips, as it colour codes the different levels of light pollution around the world, and gives you useful data on the levels of light anywhere you click! To get the most out of this map, I’d recommend changing the ‘Overlay’ setting to ‘World Atlas 2015’, and searching for somewhere within an hour or two of your house that is shaded green or (preferably) blue. Once you’ve found a rough area that looks good, you can check the levels of ‘Sky Brightness’ by clicking on the area. For some context, this map tells me that the ‘brightness’ in Central London is 9.80mcd/m2, the ‘brightness’ where I recently was in Durham is 1.67mcd/m2, and the ‘brightness’ in the North Pennines where I visited for my last stargazing trip is 0.215mcd/m2. You don’t need to understand the measurements to get a good idea of where will be dark enough to visit. If you can find somewhere near you under 0.3mcd/m2 then that would be ideal! Once you have a rough area chosen, you can just look on a map to find a suitable spot to drive to (I usually use google street view), and you’re sorted!

Moon Phase, Weather and Levels of Darkness

Once you’ve chosen a spot to visit, the date and time of your trip will be dictated largely by three factors: the moon phase, the weather, and the levels of darkness (separate from light pollution). While this seems like a lot to juggle, there is a very convenient website that has all this information in one place! Easy, right? It’s called Clear Outside, and I would certainly recommend checking it out for any sort of astro planning.

Moon Phase

You could have brilliant weather and a perfectly dark sky, but that all wouldn’t mean very much if there is a big, bright moon washing out the skies. As such, you’ll need to check online for the moon cycles, and make sure only to plan your trip on a day around the new moon. For example, if the New Moon is on the 11th May (the next one at the time of writing), I would try to plan the trip between the 7th and 15th May. You can also check the moon phases for the coming week on the Clear Outside website. Obviously, these are just guidelines, but you want to make sure you don’t get to your planned spot on a perfectly clear night, only to have all the stars obscured by the light of the moon!

Weather

The weather will probably be the most important factor in determining when your stargazing trip goes ahead. After all, there’s not much point driving hours out of the city to stare at some dark clouds. Open up the Clear Outside website, set your home address (and then the address of the place you have chosen to go) and, voila, another set of colour coded information! There is a lot of information shown on this page, but it’s very easy to pick out the info relevant to our trip planning. On the left-hand side of the page, there are the days of the coming week, and to the right of those days is an hour-by-hour chart displaying the expected levels of cloud cover. Essentially, red means ‘no stargazing for you’, orange means ‘it’s probably not worth the hassle’, and green means ‘a night of stargazing awaits’! I would be careful to make sure the whole night is green, so you can be certain that no pesky clouds will come and ruin the fun. A chart like the one in the picture below is the dream, but if you're somewhere like me, these perfect nights are few and far between!

Sky Brightness

The brightness of the sky is determined by the time of year and the moon phase, both of which cause varying levels of sky brightness across the period of any single night. The Clear Outside website is going to be your friend in this regard, with two conveniently colour coded lines (I know, I know, you’re sick of colour coding at this point) showing both forms of brightness throughout the night. Directly under the hour-by-hour cloud cover chart is a line with yellow, orange, blue and black segments, denoting the levels of darkness throughout the day and night (check out the image above). Ideally, you will want to visit your chosen spot during a ‘black’ period, which denotes the darkest time of the night. This will become increasingly difficult, and at times impossible during summer where the sky never reaches the same levels of darkness as it does during winter. Just do the best you can! The line underneath this one shows the light given off by moon, so you can see (in grey) when the moonlight might affect your view of the skies. In summary, try to find a time when the night is at its darkest and unobscured by moonlight. And there you go! That’s everything you have to consider when planning the perfect stargazing trip! Hopefully this will allow you to experience the incredible vastness of the night sky in a way you perhaps never have done before.

Going the Extra Mile (Figuratively Speaking)

Perhaps you’ve stargazed before, or simply want to get the most out of the experience. If so, then it might be a good idea to check what constellations, visible deep sky objects etc. will be in the sky at the time of your trip. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to see the Milky Way (in which case you’ll want to go from August-November if in England), or the Andromeda Galaxy, and want to make sure you’re on track to see them! I would recommend downloading Stellarium, a free, interactive planetarium, that, after a short learning curve, will enhance your stargazing experience greatly. It will let you input the date, time and location of your trip, and will show you the night sky exactly as you will experience it! This will allow you to plan what to see, help you navigate the sky, and perhaps motivate you to bring some binoculars to view deep sky objects such as the Orion Nebula. Alternatively, you could look up some star charts (as I discussed in this post) which will help you understand the night skies a little better. That being said, if you go to a location dark enough, it can be difficult to discern the constellations due to all the stars being so bright!

Summary:

· Use a light pollution map to find a suitable location for your stargazing trip.

· Check the moon phases and try to plan your trip as close to the new moon as possible.

· Find a night that promises clear skies.

· Make the trip at a suitable time to miss any moonlight and to catch the darkness at its peak.

· Check out some star charts or Stellarium to get the most out of the trip.

Final Thoughts

Thanks to Alex Davies for this awesome pic!

While this post has looked into planning a successful stargazing trip, there are a few other things to think about. If you’re going in Winter, when the skies are at their darkest, you’ll also be met with some very cold nights. Never underestimate the power of the cold to cut a stargazing trip short! I’ve planned on doing some astrophotography on previous occasions, only to be so cold as to give up on the prospect of any pictures at all. So, dress warm. Also, bring a chair and some warm drinks so you can sit back and relax. If possible, take wind into account and plan a night where the wind is low (or preferably non-existent). If you do all these things and follow the steps above, you could be in for a brilliant night of stargazing, and an experience that you won’t forget in a hurry.

Good luck on your stargazing trip, and Clear Skies!