Observatory

Most dark-sky destinations ask you to drive somewhere remote, set up your own gear, and hope the weather holds. Pic du Midi does something almost no other site in Europe offers: it puts a 130-year-old research observatory on a 2,877-metre summit, runs a cable car up to it, and, if you can stomach the price, lets you sleep the night at the top with the telescopes. It sits at the centre of France’s only International Dark Sky Reserve. This is a guide to what the sky is actually like there, how to get up, what the overnight stay includes, and the much cheaper way to use the same dark skies from the valleys below. ...

La Palma has something no other island in the world can match: a national law — Ley 31/1988, the Ley del Cielo — that controls every streetlight, bans upward-pointing fixtures, and dims the grid after midnight. The law exists to protect the sky above the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, where the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias sits at 2,396 m altitude. The side effect for visitors is an island with some of the darkest measured skies in Europe, over 300 clear nights per year, and 16 purpose-built astronomical viewpoints. ...