Where to Go Stargazing in May

May closes the door on the aurora completely. Where April still had a couple of marginal aurora destinations clinging to an hour of darkness, May's aurora picks list is empty, not one destination on our tracker registers a workable dark window. This is the true handoff month: the far north goes bright for summer, and the Milky Way core season takes over as the reason to travel. By May the transition is essentially complete at the classic aurora latitudes, where twilight now lasts through the entire night.

If you were holding out hope for a late spring aurora trip, check the annual aurora season calendar and aim for September onward instead, when darkness starts returning to the high latitudes.

The core season is now open in both hemispheres

May is genuinely good news for the Milky Way, and it opens with the southern hemisphere firmly in front. Uluru and the Atacama Desert both hold a score of 3 with over 10 hours of usable darkness, among the longest windows on the calendar. Aoraki Mackenzie in New Zealand actually posts the longest raw darkness of the month at 11 hours, though it sits at a score of 2 rather than 3, worth knowing before you plan around it as a sure thing. By late May the core clears the horizon well before midnight here, so a comfortable evening start still catches hours of prime viewing before dawn twilight begins.

The northern hemisphere isn't lagging far behind. Mauna Kea, Tenerife and La Palma all reach a score of 3 with 7.5 to 8.3 hours of dark sky, and two US desert parks join them at the same score: Joshua Tree at 6.9 hours and Bryce Canyon at 6.4 hours. That's five northern-hemisphere destinations at top marks in the same month, which doesn't happen often. If a long-haul southern trip isn't realistic, a US national park is a legitimate substitute this month, not a consolation prize.

May also brings the Eta Aquariids, debris shed by Halley's Comet, peaking on May 5 with a respectable ZHR of 50. The radiant sits low in Aquarius, so northern viewers usually catch only a handful of earthgrazers skimming the atmosphere at a shallow angle, while observers south of the equator see it climb 40 degrees or more above the horizon in the two or three hours before dawn. Time your trip around the new moon, which falls near the middle of the month (check the exact date for your travel year), for the cleanest skies for either the shower or the core.

The short version: skip aurora planning entirely this month and book around the Milky Way instead. The southern hemisphere leads, but this is also the first month where northern desert parks earn a genuine seat at the table.