Review: Lake Hudson Recreational Area

Hello Lowbrows,

The topic of observing at Lake Hudson comes up fairly often in our group. If you aren’t familiar with this site, it’s a large state park southwest of Adrian. This park was the first dark sky preserve in Michigan. From Ann Arbor, it’s around 60-75 minutes or 50 miles away. Skies are a predicted Bortle 4 “green zone” on the light pollution maps.

I live about 25 minutes further east of this site, making it around 1.5 hours away. Not a bad drive, but a huge pain to make in the wee hours of the morning.

I decided to camp this site on Sunday night. 60% of my forecasts showed mostly clear skies with fairly poor transparency. I rolled the dice and mostly lost with consistent thin cloud cover starting 30 minutes after true dark. It was still a great learning experience to survey the campsites and sky conditions. For more context on why I cared about the campground horizons instead of the dedicated observing area, my truck bed tent is sketchy to drive with. I wanted to simply park and set up on my site to maximize the observing window. After observing, I can just throw the cover on my dob before getting into bed.

I camped in spot 12, along the back of the campground. I selected this site since it has a meadow and (eventually) the lake behind it. Horizons were great with unobstructed views to the east and west. North was also clear, but the south was fairly limited by trees. I think spot 13 would be better for summer. It had a more open southern horizon for all of those milky way objects. It also has a private trail to the lake. Blocking stray light would be harder though since it’s on the outside of the curve. Despite this, I would go spot 13 for summer and 12 for galaxy season since it has a better eastern horizon.

Spots 12-13 are clearly the best for observing from a horizons/privacy perspective, but spot 1 or 25 could also do the trick. It was the tail end of a holiday weekend, so the campground was fairly empty. I don’t think stray light from other sites would be much of a problem during busier times though. Most sites have trees/vegetation between them, and they are spaced far apart. Only the road would pose a problem, but I parked my truck in a position to limit any stray light. I only saw 2-3 vehicles the entire evening/night.

In the morning, I checked out the observation area. It’s nothing too special with a giant parking lot featuring slightly better horizons than my campsite. There is a sign for visitors to dim lights before entering the parking area, but it’s pretty open. I probably wouldn’t want to set up there during a meteor shower since I’m sure it gets very crowded. Fun for outreach but not observing.

This observing area is around .5 miles from the campground. Probably too far to carry large gear back and forth without a vehicle, especially since the campground is on a dirt road. If your vehicle is movable after setting up camp, you won’t have a problem driving your gear back and forth. Due to the distance between the campground and observing area, I wouldn’t leave any gear unattended after the observing session.