Best Stargazing Locations in Louisiana

The first thing you’ll want to do is scope out darker skies. Check out this dark sky map and. The best public land location I would recommend is Kisatchie National Forest. There’s a ton of public campgrounds in dark sky zones, making it easy to plan a stargazing trip.

Top Stargazing Factors

These are the top factors to consider when planning for stargazing:

• Thinner air. Less precipitation and higher altitudes have thinner air which means there’s less between you and the sky. This means Fall and Winter are naturally a bit better for stargazing.
• Low light pollution. Look at a light pollution map and pick the best spot with the least light pollution.
• Avoid the moon! You want as little moonlight as possible interfering with your sky. So wait for either a new moon or a night when the moon is below the horizon.
• Let your eyes adjust to the dark. Our eyes take between 15 and 30 minutes to fully adjust to the dark sky. This makes a huge difference and you will see far more stars as time goes on. One glance at a campfire or phone screen will ruin your night eye adjustment. No campfires or flashlights. Put your phone on red light mode and rarely use it. Find a star map app that has red light mode to help you navigate the sky.

Best Times of the year

If you’re trying to get a picture with a ton of stars flowing through the Milky Way clouds, summertime is the best time to do it. The summer night sky is facing the center of the Milky Way which has the most stars and dramatic views. The only downsides are the mosquitos, heat, and thicker air.

Great views of bright constellations like Orion and star clusters like Pleiades. If you can manage, cold fronts provide excellent clarity. This season technically has the fewest number of stars in the night sky, but Winter offers the clearest viewing of Louisiana’s night sky.

Pack List

Camera Equipment

Stargazing is one of the most amazing meditations for people who like to think about philosophy, meaning, and the cosmos. Here’s some thoughts to consider while stargazing.

Scale of the Known Universe

Our Solar System is comprised of one star, the sun. Our galaxy the Milky Way has over 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) stars including our sun. Outside of our galaxy, our nearest neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy with over 400 billion stars. In the Observable Universe (only that which we can see), there are trillions of galaxies.

If you traveled to the nearest star Alpha Centauri as fast as humanly possible, it would take you 7,000 years to arrive. Traveling at the fastest speed achieved by humans which is 430,000 miles per hour (Parker Solar Probe), it would take you about 7,000 years to travel the 25 trillion miles to Alpha Centauri. This is only 4 light years away. The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to be about 150,000 light years across.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. When you look at the Andromeda Galaxy, it took 2.5 million years for that light to reach your eye. You’re seeing what the Andromeda Galaxy looked like when our ancestors started to resemble the modern human species.

The Andromeda Galaxy is both the largest and furthest thing you can see with your eyes. By far. Once you see it, you’ve set that record for life.

Astronomical Odds

Even considering the most modest calculations of the Drake Equation, we are almost certainly not alone in the universe. Saying “Earth is one in a million” is like saying “There are 40,000,000 Earths in the Milky Way galaxy alone.”

“If we’re not alone, why don’t we see them when we look up?” Take a look at this photo. That’s Earth from the Voyager probe as it left our Solar System. Do you see any signs of life? Any buildings? Technology? That’s what we look like to anyone else out there. On a cosmic scale, we don’t make ripples. The same can be assumed about everyone else.

“Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson