Dark Sky Finder Helps Nighttime Photographers Find the Least Light Polluted Spots
For those of you who partake in any sort of nighttime photography, it’s no secret that light pollution can be the bane of your existence. Thankfully, there’s a neat, simple online resource that can help you better prepare to avoid this enemy of great Milky Way photography.
It’s called Dark Sky Finder, and it’s an easy-to-use website that gives you an up-to-date, radar-style view of what light pollution across the United States looks like.
Even in seemingly small towns, the slightest bit of fallout light can prohibit you from capturing the nighttime photographs you need. In larger cities it can be borderline impossible unless you employ some tricks we’ve mentioned in the past.
Dark Sky Finder is meant to ease these pains by providing a simple way to find the nearest location that ensures you’ll get the shot you need — no post-processing trickery required.
Right now, the app is using information from both Google and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center to display not just light pollution information, but also various crowdsourced ‘sites’ with information on the location, who owns it, whether there is dedicated parking, whether there are any bathrooms nearby and so on and so forth.
Dark Sky Finder is fairly basic in execution, but it gets the job done and the ‘sites’ feature mentioned above makes it particularly useful. So head on over to the website now and give it a run-through to see what conditions are like in your area.
(h/t SickSalamander)
