Enjoying the star-filled skies is one of the best parts of spending the night outdoors. It evokes a sense of wonder and awe. Unless you have a flat-folding roooftop tent with a sunroof, however, you’ll often get the best views of the night sky outside your tent, where you’re at the complete mercy of mosquitoes, damp grounds, and the rest of the elements. The Sky View Backpacker changes that.
Billed as a “stargazing tent,” the three-season shelter offers unimpeded view of the night skies from inside its confines, allowing you to enjoy the splendor of celestial sights behind insect-proof walls and a dry cushioned floor. Whether you’re a serious astronomy nerd with a smart telescope in tow, a casual stargazer who finds it relaxing, or some dude who likes to count stars to fall asleep, this thing lets you enjoy all that while slipping inside a comfortable shelter.
The Sky View Backpacker is a big departure from your usual tent design. For one, it has large mesh walls on either side, affording you that unimpeded view of the sky and stars. It uses Phifer UltraVue 2 Polyester bug mesh for those walls, by the way, which offer “crystal-clear stargazing visibility” with its 18 x 18 weave. Of course, it’s not the first tent to use mesh walls for enjoying the exterior views. However, others have paired those walls with a rainfly to protect from inclement weather, which you’ll have to remove from the outside to actually get a clear view of the skies. Not the case here.
Instead of requiring you to pitch a rainfly outside the tent, it uses a patent-pending interior rainfly system sitting right below the mesh that you can deploy without leaving the tent. That means, if it ever rains, you can simply put it in place without having to exit your shelter. Even better, you simply pull it to deploy, almost like a waterproof curtain. Once set up, the rainfly adeptly keeps water from entering the tent, instead simply rolling it down the fly, moves it to the lower mesh edge, and drips it down to the exterior tub floor fabric before hitting the ground outside. It’s quite unique.
The Sky View Backpacker has a tent body cut in 30D tear-resistant nylon, which gets waterproof coating on the floor and sides, while the indoor rainfly is cut in 20D nylon with a similar waterproof coating. Simply put, this thing is built to handle the elements on top of its unique stargazing talents. It comes with 20.2mm aluminum poles.
When deployed, by the way, the tent measures 42 x 52 x 80 inches (height x width x depth), so there’s enough room inside to sleep two people comfortably. It weighs 4.6 pounds, so it’s not exactly the kind of ultra-light tent backpackers prefer, but there’s nothing like it for anyone who want unfiltered views of the stellar night skies. If you need a similar tent with a bigger footprint, the outfit also offers the Sky View XL, which is a four-person tent sporting the same stargazing design.
The Sky View Backpacker is available now, priced at $349.
