Hidden Valley
34.0122° N, 116.1686° W
A boulder-ringed bowl that blocks what little light pollution reaches the park from the west. The classic first stop, and the one most visitors remember.
Dark sky country
Stargazing in Joshua Tree National Park
Nearly 800,000 acres of protected desert, certified as an International Dark Sky Park in 2017, two hours from Los Angeles and a world away from its glow.
Why the sky goes black here
A rare piece of protected darkness in Southern California
Joshua Tree National Park sits at the seam where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meet. The air is dry, the elevation is high, and the nearest serious light domes — Palm Springs to the south, the Los Angeles basin far to the west — are blocked or blunted by the mountains.
Most of the park measures Bortle 3 to 4 on the sky darkness scale, and the southern reaches around Cottonwood push into genuinely pristine territory. In practical terms: on a moonless night the Milky Way is bright enough to cast a faint shadow, and you can see roughly fifteen times more stars than from a suburban back garden.
Around three million people visit Joshua Tree every year, and a growing share of them arrive specifically for what happens after sunset. Rangers run night sky programmes, the annual Night Sky Festival sells out, and on any clear weekend the pullouts along Park Boulevard fill with tripods.
That is the sky The Joshua Tree Crater Company works under. Our whole catalogue was assembled by people who spend their nights out here with charts and cold hands.
Bortle 3 · Park Boulevard
The galactic core clears the horizon from late spring through early autumn.
Where to stand
Six places in the park to point a telescope
All are inside Joshua Tree National Park and reachable on paved or well-graded roads. Check park hours and entrance conditions before you set out.
Cap Rock
34.0028° N, 116.1614° W
Flat, open, and easy to reach after dark, with a large car park and a horizon low enough to catch the Milky Way core rising in summer.
Keys View
33.9264° N, 116.1867° W
Five thousand feet up, looking down the Coachella Valley. The valley glow sits below you, which makes the sky overhead feel enormous.
Jumbo Rocks
33.9942° N, 116.0631° W
Deeper into the park and correspondingly darker. Popular with astrophotographers who want granite in the foreground.
Cottonwood Spring
33.7378° N, 115.8136° W
The far southern entrance, and the darkest measured sky in the park. Worth the drive on a moonless night in winter.
Ryan Mountain trailhead
33.9861° N, 116.1364° W
Central, high, and exposed. Good for tracking the Moon low in the sky when the terminator is at its most dramatic.
Field notes
Getting the most out of a night out here
Give your eyes forty minutes
Full dark adaptation takes about half an hour, and a single glance at a phone screen undoes most of it. Use a red light or none at all.
Work with the Moon, not against it
For the Milky Way you want a new moon. For crater hunting you want the opposite: a first or last quarter, when shadows are longest along the terminator.
Binoculars beat a bad telescope
A steady pair of 10x50s braced on a car roof will show you more of the Moon than a wobbly department-store telescope ever will.
The desert gets genuinely cold
A 95°F afternoon can fall to 45°F by 2am. Bring far more layers than feels reasonable when you set off.
What is up there
What a Joshua Tree sky actually shows you
The Milky Way, edge on
From roughly May to September the galactic core rises in the southeast after dark: a mottled band of dust lanes and star clouds, obvious to the naked eye, spectacular through binoculars.
The Moon in relief
At first and last quarter the terminator cuts the disc in half and every crater along it stands up in shadow. This is when your dedicated crater looks its best.
Planets, clusters and the odd surprise
Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula in winter, and on a good August night, Perseid meteors two or three a minute.
Take something home from a Joshua Tree night
A photograph fades into a camera roll. A named crater sits in the sky above the park for the rest of your life, and hangs on your wall in the meantime.
Choose your crater