How to Use This Page
Every guide listed below was written for one metropolitan area, not one city limit. If you live in Plano, Mesa, Oakland or Yonkers, the guide you want is the Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Bay Area or New York one, and each row below names the suburbs it covers so you can find yours without guessing. We do not publish separate pages for suburbs: a dark-sky drive from Fremont and a dark-sky drive from San Jose end at the same hills, and one thorough guide beats five thin ones. The state guides take over where the metro guides stop, at the two-hour line, and cover the national parks and certified dark-sky places worth a weekend.
Each city guide follows the same test. The sites are rated on the Bortle scale, from a class 9 downtown to the class 2 and 3 deserts, and the drive time is measured from a named downtown landmark, not from the city edge. Every guide includes at least one place inside the metro where you can look through a large telescope for free, because for most beginners that is a better first night than a long drive, and every guide names the club that runs it. The satellite image at the top of this page is the whole argument in one frame: the glow is where people live, the dark is where they should go, and the two are closer together than the glow suggests.
The pattern that shapes every guide here: the eastern half of the country glows almost without a break, while the West is dark between its cities, which is why a Denver or Las Vegas observer reaches a Bortle 2 sky in two hours and a New York observer settles for Bortle 4. Image: NASA Earth Observatory, Suomi NPP VIIRS data courtesy of NOAA NGDC.