Live camera
Big Bend National Park live camera — Texas
A wide view over the Chihuahuan Desert. On a clear day peaks 130 km away are plainly visible. It refreshes every fifteen minutes.
Sample September 2026What you are looking at
A desert park in Texas, at the place where the Rio Grande makes its big bend. It covers more than 3,200 square kilometres, and paved road reaches only a small part of that.
This is known as the darkest sky of any national park in the United States. There are no large towns nearby, the far bank of the river is Mexico, and artificial light does not reach here. For the same reason the air carries little haze, and on a clear day you can see mountains 130 kilometres away. What fills the frame is the Chihuahuan Desert, and the Chisos Mountains standing in it like an island are unusual in sitting entirely inside a national park boundary. During the day heat shimmer makes the distant ranges waver. It is famous for dark skies, but this is a still image, so what comes back at night is not stars but a black frame.
In 1971 the beds here produced the bones of the largest flying animal yet found, a Cretaceous reptile with a wingspan of about eleven metres, exposed in a bank the river had cut. More than 450 bird species have been recorded here, more than in any other national park in the country.
In the Chisos mountains there are living things left behind after the ice age ended. Trees and birds that were spread across the whole country in a cooler, wetter time were shut up in the cool heights alone once the ground around them turned to desert. One of the birds nests nowhere else in the United States.
Central time, fourteen to fifteen hours behind Japan; around eleven at night in Japan is local morning.
About this camera
| Place | Texas |
| Format | Still image |
| Time zone | America/Chicago (UTC-6, DST UTC-5) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | U.S. National Park Service |
| Terms of use | U.S. government work |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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