Places · Impact site
Chicxulub crater
A 180 km crater, half of it under the Gulf, left by a 10 km asteroid 66 million years ago. The impact ended the Cretaceous and about three quarters of all species with it.
- Where
- Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
- Coordinates
- 21.40°N 89.52°W
- Age
- 66 million years ago
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- lpi.usra.edu
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 3 — rural transition, Bortle 3–4, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 6.2–7.0. The Milky Way is clearly there but loses its detail near the horizon. Light domes are obvious in several directions.
Against that sky 106 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 106 in a 130mm, with 38 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 15 km north-east of here.
The Sun drops far enough below the horizon here for full astronomical darkness on every night of the year — which is not true of anywhere much further from the equator.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 40° at its highest, which puts the brightest part of the Milky Way clear of the horizon murk without ever being overhead. Of the 110 Messier objects, 2 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Black Eye Galaxy, Crab Nebula and Dumbbell Nebula, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Bode's Galaxy and Cigar Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 21.40°N 89.52°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Chicxulub crater?
Everything south of declination −69°. From 21.4°N that is a cap 21° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 3.4% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 3.4% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Chicxulub crater get?
Between 7 hours 43 minutes on the shortest night of the year, around 21 June, and 10 hours 32 minutes on the longest, around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. The sky here reaches it on every night of the year, which is not true much further from the equator.
When is the Milky Way best from Chicxulub crater?
From roughly May to September, peaking around 17 June when the core is on the meridian at midnight and drifting into the evening sky thereafter. The useful thing about 21.4°N is that every one of those nights actually gets dark — at higher latitudes the best weeks of the core season are also the weeks with no astronomical night at all.
How far is Chicxulub crater from the other sites on this map?
Starbase is the nearest thing to it here — 930 km to the north-west. The nearest other impact site is Barringer (Meteor) Crater, 2,590 km to the north-west. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.