Places · Observatory
Kitt Peak National Observatory
More than twenty telescopes on Tohono O'odham land, including the Mayall 4 m, which now runs DESI — five thousand robotic fibres measuring redshifts all night.
- Where
- Arizona, United States
- Coordinates
- 31.96°N 111.60°W
- Since
- 1958
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- noirlab.edu
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 2 — rural, Bortle 2–3, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 6.7–7.5. The Milky Way is structured and obvious. Light domes sit low on the horizon over distant towns, and the rest of the sky is genuinely dark.
Against that sky 107 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 107 in a 130mm, with 44 reachable by eye alone. There is nowhere darker worth driving to; this is already among the better skies on the planet.
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 29° 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, 5 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Ring Nebula, Triangulum Galaxy and Hercules Cluster, 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 31.96°N 111.60°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 Kitt Peak National Observatory?
Everything south of declination −58°. From 32.0°N that is a cap 32° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 7.6% 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 7.6% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Kitt Peak National Observatory get?
From about 6 hours 25 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 11 hours 2 minutes around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
When is the Milky Way best from Kitt Peak National Observatory?
Mid-June at its highest, with a workable season either side of it running from about May into September. Because 32.0°N keeps full astronomical darkness all year, the whole of that season is usable, which is not the case for observers much further from the equator, who lose the peak of it to summer twilight.
How far is Kitt Peak National Observatory from the other sites on this map?
Barringer (Meteor) Crater is the nearest thing to it here — 345 km to the north. The nearest other observatory is Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, 440 km to the north-east. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.