Hidden Valley
34.0122° N, 116.1686° W
A boulder-ringed bowl that blocks what little light pollution reaches it from the west. The classic first stop, and the one most people remember.
Dark sky country
Stargazing in the Joshua Tree Desert
Why the sky goes black here
A rare piece of protected darkness in Southern California
The Joshua Tree desert 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.
The desert here measures Bortle 3 to 4 on the sky darkness scale, and the southern reaches 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.
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 · Joshua Tree, California
The galactic core clears the horizon from late spring through early autumn.
Where to stand
Six places to point a telescope
All are in the Joshua Tree desert and reachable on paved or well-graded roads. Check access hours and conditions before you set out.
Cap Rock
34.0028° N, 116.1614° W
Flat, open, and easy to reach after dark, with plenty of room to set up 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
Further out and correspondingly darker. Popular with astrophotographers who want granite in the foreground.
Cottonwood Spring
33.7378° N, 115.8136° W
The far southern end, and the darkest measured sky in the region. 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 desert for the rest of your life, and hangs on your wall in the meantime.
Choose your crater