What this is
Dark Skies Directory is a directory and calendar for people in the United States and Canada who plan travel and camping around celestial events: eclipses, aurora, meteor showers, and certified dark sky places. It is written for beginners and kids taking their first look at the night sky, and for advanced amateurs who want the primary source behind every claim.
Editorial standards
Every factual claim on this site carries an inline link to its primary source: NASA, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, the US Naval Observatory, DarkSky International, the International Meteor Organization, the American Meteor Society, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, state legislatures, and municipal codes, among others. Nothing is published without a source, and nothing is invented: if a fact cannot be verified, it is left out rather than guessed at.
Dark Skies Directory is edited by Peter Benes and Adrienne Kmetz; research and drafting are assisted by AI tools, and a person decides what goes live.
Nightly News is a hand-picked roundup of night-sky and space news: astronomy and sky events, aurora and space weather, eclipses, dark-sky and light-pollution policy, NASA/ESA/CSA missions and funding, satellites and astronomy, official UAP news, space travel, and the occasional fun culture story. Every item carries our take plus a link to its source.
Machine readability
This site is built to be read by people and machines alike. Every page is available as HTML, Markdown, and JSON at the same path. See /research for the primary sources behind the data, and /llms.txt for a machine-readable index of the site.