Camping under a certified dark sky
202 of the 5,569 campgrounds on this site sit inside or near one of 63 International Dark Sky Places. They are spread over 21 states, and 4 of those states have enough to get a state page under the dark sky list. 42 of the 202 take no reservations.
What the certification is
DarkSky International certifies parks, reserves, sanctuaries and communities that meet its standards for sky quality and outdoor lighting. The organization publishes the list of certified places with the year each was certified. This site reads that list and joins it to the campground records by location. The certification says the place has committed to protecting its night sky and has measured it. It does not say the sky will be clear on any given night.
How a campground gets on the list
The rule is a distance rule. A campground is listed when it sits inside a certified National Park Service unit, when it is within ten miles of a certified park, reserve or sanctuary, or when it is within five miles of a certified community. The campground page names the certified place, its type, the year of certification and the distance to the place's reference point.
The reference point is a single coordinate for a place that may cover hundreds of square miles, so a campground inside a large certified park can show a distance of several miles. That distance is to the point, and the sky above the campground is still inside the certified area.
The join is this site's. DarkSky International certifies places and does not rate campgrounds. The dark sky page lists every matched campground with the certified place beside it, and the dark sky list breaks the same campgrounds out by state with a map.
Planning the night
Two things decide whether you see a dark sky at a certified place, and neither is in the certification. The first is the moon. A full moon lights the ground well enough to walk without a headlamp and washes out the Milky Way. The nights around the new moon are the dark ones. The second is the weather. Cloud cover ends the viewing, and the summer monsoon in the Southwest brings evening clouds to many of the certified parks there.
The campground page shows the forecast for the campground's coordinates from the National Weather Service. Check the sky cover for the nights you plan to be there, and check the moon phase against your dates before you book.
At the campground
Certified places manage their own lighting, and campgrounds inside them often ask campers to do the same. Use a red light or a dimmed headlamp and point it at the ground. Turn vehicle headlights off once parked. Where the agency published campground rules, they appear on the campground page under "Know before you go".
A site with open sky serves this purpose better than a shaded one. Where a campground has a site guide, the shade column shows what the agency recorded for each site, and sites at the edge of a loop tend to have the widest view.
Booking a dark-sky campground
160 of the matched campgrounds take reservations on Recreation.gov, and the National Park Service runs 56 percent of them. The guide to the Recreation.gov reservation window explains how far ahead those open. The 42 that take no reservation follow the walk-up pattern in the guide to how first-come campgrounds work, and the parks around them fill early in summer.
There is also a dark-sky tool on Labs, built alongside these pages.