when the moon is out of the way, whether the sky will be clear, and where to drive — forty dark overlooks, balds and campgrounds across western north carolina.
tonight
every new moon for the next twelve months, with the days on either side that make up the window. click one to jump the calendar there.
forty high, open, dark places across western north carolina, from the cherohala skyway to doughton park. set your home town and the map and the list reorder around it, nearest first. drive times are estimates, and all of it needs checking before you drive.
phase times come from the meeus true-phase algorithm and are converted to your local time zone, so dates should match published almanacs to the day. the window is a planning heuristic: the moon also rises and sets, so a waxing crescent a few days past new is gone by late evening, and a waning crescent doesn't rise until the small hours. those edge days are often darker than they look. cloud cover comes from open-meteo and is a model, not a promise; the spot notes are hand-written and are not a substitute for checking with the land manager. the sky line beneath each one is not hand-written: it is sampled from the light pollution atlas at the spot and at eight bearings 10, 25 and 50 km out, so “brightest to the northwest at 50 km” means a town sits there, not that somebody remembers it that way.