Griffith Observatory: Free Telescope Nights, the Planetarium & How to Visit

You stand in a line on the roof of a building above Los Angeles, waiting your turn at a brass telescope that has been pointed at the sky since 1935. When you finally bend to the eyepiece, Saturn is sitting there with its rings, small and sharp and real, while thirteen million people’s worth of city lights glitter in the dark below you. That is Griffith Observatory, and the remarkable part is that looking through that telescope, like walking in the door, costs nothing. It is the most-visited public observatory in the world, and one of the great free nights out anywhere in the country.

Outer Space Trip may earn a commission from some booking links on this page; your price is the same. Admission and telescope viewing are free; the planetarium and the guided tours are not. Prices and hours change, so confirm on the official griffithobservatory.org before you go.

What Griffith Observatory is

Griffith Observatory sits on the south slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, a short drive up from the city. It opened in 1935 as a gift to the people of Los Angeles with a simple instruction in its founder’s will: let the public look through a real telescope, for free, forever. Nearly a century later it still does exactly that. It is a working public observatory, a science museum, and a planetarium in one Art Deco building, and the whole site — the galleries, the grounds, the lawn with its view of the Hollywood Sign — is free to enter.

Inside, the exhibits are hands-on and genuinely good: a Foucault pendulum knocking over pegs to prove the Earth turns, a Tesla coil, a periodic table with a real sample of most elements, a scale model of the solar system you walk along, and the Big Picture, one of the largest astronomical images ever assembled. But the exhibits are not why you time your visit for after dark. Two things make this trip, and both happen at night.

Free public telescope viewing (the reason to come at night)

Every evening the Observatory is open and the sky is clear, its telescopes are rolled out and pointed at whatever is up — the Moon, a planet, a bright double star — and anyone can look, free, no ticket, no reservation. There are two kinds. On the roof of the east dome is the historic 12-inch Zeiss refractor, a 1935 instrument that more people have looked through than any other telescope on Earth. On the front lawn, the Observatory’s own telescope demonstrators and volunteers from the Los Angeles Sidewalk Astronomers set up portable scopes, and the line for those moves far faster than the line for the Zeiss.

Viewing starts once it is dark enough, usually around 7:00 p.m., and demonstrators cut the line for each telescope at 9:30 p.m., so the building can close at 10. The catch is the wait: the Zeiss line on a clear weekend night can run an hour or more. Come on a weeknight if you can, head for the lawn telescopes first, and do not plan your whole evening around one look through the big refractor. A city sky washes out faint, dim things, so what you see here is the bright stuff — the Moon’s craters, Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons — and the Moon through that 1935 lens is worth the wait on its own.

Once a month the Observatory runs a free public star party on the lawn with local astronomy clubs, who bring a field of telescopes of every size and happily talk you through each one. It is the best single night to come. The dates are posted on the Observatory’s calendar; they move with the Moon, so check before you drive up.

The Samuel Oschin Planetarium

The one thing inside that costs money is the planetarium, and it is the best of its kind in the country — a Zeiss star projector and a laser system under a 75-foot dome, with a live presenter rather than a canned soundtrack. Shows run about 40 minutes, change through the year, and are for ages 5 and up. Tickets are around $10 for adults and a few dollars less for children and seniors, and here is the part that trips people up: you buy them on-site, the day of, at the box office — there is no advance online sale, and popular shows sell out, so buy your show time when you first arrive and plan the rest of your visit around it. Confirm the current price at the box office; the figure above is a recent read, not a quote.

Hours, and the thing to know before you drive up

The Observatory is open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 10:00 p.m., and weekends from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. It is closed Mondays. That late close is deliberate — this is one of the few major science institutions built to be open after dark, because the whole point is the night sky. Go in the late afternoon, watch the sun set over the Pacific from the terrace, and stay for the telescopes.

The grounds around the building stay open later than the building itself, and the view of the Los Angeles basin and the Hollywood Sign from the front lawn is free whenever the park road is open.

Parking and getting there

Parking is the real friction of a Griffith visit. There is paid parking along the road up to the Observatory and in the small lot by the building, charged by the hour at pay stations, and on a clear weekend evening it fills early and the queue of circling cars is genuine. Three ways to beat it: come on a weeknight; arrive before sunset when spaces are still open; or skip the car entirely and take the DASH Observatory bus, which runs up from the Vermont/Sunset Metro B (Red) Line station for a token fare on afternoons, evenings and weekends — it drops you at the front door for a fraction of the parking cost and none of the stress. You can also park lower in Griffith Park and walk up the trail, about a mile, which is a pleasant climb by day and a dark one at night.

Is a guided tour worth it?

You do not need a tour to visit Griffith Observatory. Admission is free, the telescopes are free, and the planetarium ticket is cheap and bought at the door. A guided tour buys you three things: a knowledgeable walk through the galleries and the history, a guaranteed planetarium seat without the box-office line, and, on some options, round-trip transport so you skip the parking problem entirely. If any of those is worth it to you — especially the transport, if you are staying in Hollywood or downtown without a car — it can turn a stressful evening into an easy one.

The one most worth a look is the observatory-led Insider Tour with a planetarium show (about $56 when we checked on September 26, 2026, 4.5 stars), a roughly 90-minute small-group walk led by observatory staff that includes your planetarium seat. If you want the observatory folded into a wider evening, the Hollywood night tour that stops at Griffith (about $49) pairs it with the city’s landmarks after dark. Both are optional add-ons to a visit that is otherwise free; confirm the current price, duration and cancellation terms on the booking page before you commit.

Make a night of it

The ideal Griffith evening: arrive a couple of hours before sunset on a clear weeknight, buy your planetarium time at the box office, wander the galleries and the grounds, catch sunset and the city lighting up from the terrace, see the show, then join the telescope line on the lawn as the sky goes dark. Bring a jacket — the hill is cooler and windier than the basin — and leave the tripod and the big camera at home; the terrace rail is crowded and the sky is too bright for deep-sky photography anyway. If Griffith lights the spark, the next step is a sky actually dark enough to show it all, and California has some of the best within a few hours’ drive.