The World's Best Places to See the Milky Way With the Naked Eye

For anyone who has grown up around bright streets and glowing city skylines, seeing the Milky Way properly can feel almost unreal. Instead of a handful of familiar stars, the sky becomes crowded with countless points of light, dark dust lanes and a pale, cloudy band stretching from horizon to horizon. The experience does not require an expensive telescope. It requires something increasingly rare: darkness. From the deserts of Namibia and Chile to the mountains of New Zealand, several destinations offer exceptionally clear skies where our galaxy can be seen with the naked eye.