The IRAC Dark Field was chosen to lie within the Spitzer Continuous Viewing Zone (CVZ). Spitzer lies in an Earth-trailing orbit. That is, it orbits the Sun (and not the Earth) at a distance of roughly 1AU. It is continuously trailing the Earth, getting farther and farther away (eventually it will go all the way around the Sun). As a result, the natural coordinate system for the spacecraft is Ecliptic coordinates. Like many spacecraft, pointing constraints require the solar panels and the sunshade to remain pointed at the sun, establishing a permitted viewing zone. As a result, the ecliptic poles remain continuously within this permitted viewing zone. This is described in Section 3.5 of the Spitzer Observer's Manual.

Of the two poles, the northern CVZ was selected to make it easier to acquire ancillary data in the region. The exact determination of the location within the CVZ at 17h40m +69d00m was made by examining the 2MASS and IRAS catalogs within the polar region. A figure of merit was computed based on the number of sources of a given brightness. Because it was selected to be free of bright near-infrared and mid-infrared sources, the Dark Field is fundamentally within a "void", and the number counts within the region reflect a paucity of nearby stars or galaxies.