The Makgadikgadi Pans sit in one of the darkest patches of sky on the African continent. Our resident astronomer explains why this ancient salt flat has become one of the world's great stargazing destinations.
A Sky That Has No End
The Bortle scale measures light pollution from 1 to 9, where 1 is a perfectly dark sky and 9 is an inner-city sky where you can barely see the moon. The Makgadikgadi Pans register a 1.
There are very few places left on Earth where this is true.
What You Can See
On a clear night at Etela Makgadikgadi — which in the dry season means almost every night — the Milky Way is not a faint smear. It is a structure. You can trace its arms. You can see the dark lanes of dust that divide it. You can understand, viscerally rather than intellectually, that you are looking at the edge-on view of your own galaxy.
With the naked eye, you can see:
- The Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light years away)
- The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (our nearest galactic neighbours)
- Jupiter's moons, if you know where to look
- Satellites crossing the sky every few minutes
- Shooting stars with an average frequency of several per hour
With our telescope, you can see Saturn's rings in detail, the surface of the moon in extraordinary resolution, and nebulae — vast clouds of gas and dust where new stars are forming right now.
The Experience
We begin each stargazing session at dinner, with a map of the night sky and a brief orientation. After dark, we move to the salt pan itself — away from even the minimal light of the camp — and lay flat on the ancient lake bed.
The experience of lying on a surface that was underwater 10,000 years ago, looking at stars 10,000 light years away, tends to do something profound to people's sense of scale.
Most guests say very little. That is always a good sign.
Dr. Naledi Tau holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Cape Town. She joined the Etela team in 2024 as resident astronomer at Makgadikgadi.