The closest area to Raleigh with truly dark skies for stargazing
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Triangle residents need to drive to Virginia to experience skies with little light pollution, Axios' Kavya Beheraj reports.
State of play: Staunton River State Park in Virginia, around 70 miles north of Durham, is the closest area with a dark sky designation.
- The park is Level 2 on the Bortle scale — the second darkest level for stargazing.
Yes, but: That doesn't mean you still can't find a good place for stargazing closer to Raleigh.
- "We try to tell people if you go 20 minutes outside of the Triangle, you're going to get a nice clear sky," Nick Eakes, a science education specialist at Morehead Planetarium, told Axios last year.
UNC's Morehead Planetarium often hosts stargazing events around the Triangle's outer edges, like at Jordan Lake or Little River Regional Park, north of Durham.
- UNC Greensboro operates a telescope in a dark-sky location near the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area in Alamance County.
- And the N.C. Division of Parks & Recreation also hosts an astronomy program at Medoc Mountain State Park, around 70 miles northeast of Raleigh.
Zoom out: The darkest spots in North Carolina are in the mountains and along the coast, including Ocracoke Island, the Earth to Sky Park in Burnsville and the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman.