Badlands Astronomy Festival
Three days each July, free, and no ticket or advance registration. Telescopes are brought in by people who own them and know how to point them.
When
Annually in July. The 2025 festival ran from the 18th to the 20th. Dates for the next one are not published yet, and the park's calendar is where they appear first. There is no date on this page that has not been announced, because a wrong one sends somebody on a long drive for nothing.
What happens
The 2025 program gives the shape of it. Planet walks at 10am and 1pm, solar observing between 3pm and 5pm, and evening programs from 9pm to 11:30pm. Evenings open with a guest speaker and move outside to the telescopes, where amateur astronomers run constellation tours and the targets are planets, star clusters, nebulae and double stars.
Telescopes come from astronomers in the local community, from the park itself, from Dark Ranger Telescope Tours, and from the University of Utah. Afternoons are built for families, with static displays, equipment demonstrations and Webb Space Telescope images.
Who puts it on
The festival is free because a list of organizations funds and staffs it: the Badlands Natural History Association, Dark Ranger Telescope Tours, the Black Hills Astronomical Society, DarkSky International, the University of Utah, the Badlands National Park Conservancy, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, and Badlands National Park.
The rest of the summer
The festival is the large version of something that runs all season. Night sky viewing is offered at the Cedar Pass Campground Amphitheatre each evening through the summer, with telescopes provided, funded by Celestron and the Badlands Natural History Association.
Start time follows sunset rather than the clock: around 9:30pm in May to July, around 9pm in August, and around 8:30pm later in the season. The park's calendar carries the current time, which is worth checking on the day.
Conditions
A festival date is fixed months ahead and the weather is not. The 14-night forecast covers the same park and will say what the moon and the cloud are doing on any night in range.