7/23 Drove to the dark spot in the Catskills which I had been wanting to do for months. We left at ten so we would get there at midnight. Earlier the moon would still have been up.

Funny enough, we were not prepared for just how dark it would be if you"re going to one of the darkest spots east of the Mississippi and south of the Adirondacks, with no moon in the sky. It’s so dark you cannot walk around and find your way through a gate in a fence, for example.

The view was at first disappointing because there were some clouds, and also it took surprisingly long to get our eyes adjusted after looking at the dashboard, a smartphone screen, or the area in the headlight cones of the car. If AI hadn’t suggested it, I wouldn’t have bothered to tape little squares of red filters over the flashlights of our phones, but this turned out to be really impactful. Each time we looked at an unfiltered light source we were back to square one of adjusting.

We did see the summer triangle and the milky way running through it, did see all of our personal stars, and I finally did see the tiny Dolphin which only shows up when you have an actually very dark sky. There was not really any time to be alone with the stars with the entire family around. But we’ll be more experienced next time.