Black Mesa State Park, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, USA

Black Mesa in the Oklahoma panhandle is about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in the continental United States. I drove out here, 18 hours over two days, because it’s one of the darkest skies I could get to in a car. Along the way I got to see so many different worlds roll past: summer cornfields in Illinois and Iowa, rolling hills and woodlands of northern Missouri, through southern Kansas cornfields dotted by tiny towns, then through heart of the Dust Bowl into Oklahoma and eventually into the dry mesas of northeast New Mexico, the road stretching into the far distance.