A light-pollution check for your address
About 80% of North Americans can no longer see the Milky Way from home. Enter your ZIP and find out where you stand — and how to get your stars back.
See what light pollution took. Then go dark sky.
What can you see tonight?
ZIP — · clear skies assumed
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Unshielded, blue-rich LED street lighting scatters upward into the sky. Warm-tone, fully shielded fixtures cut skyglow — and let the stars back in. How to fix it ↓
Why your sky looks like this
Light pollution is artificial light scattered into the night atmosphere — astronomers call the result skyglow. It's growing faster than population, and it has already erased the Milky Way for most people in North America.
But unlike almost every other kind of pollution, it disappears the instant the light is fixed.
How to get your sky back
Skyglow comes from light sent upward and outward — unshielded fixtures, and cool, blue-rich light that scatters most in the atmosphere. The fix is straightforward:
Shielded, warm-toned fixtures send light down where it belongs — not up into the sky. Better lighting saves energy, improves visibility, and brings back stars.
See dark-sky-friendly lighting →Methodology & data
Sky brightness is estimated from NASA's VIIRS Black Marble nighttime-lights data and translated to the Bortle scale. Visibility reflects typical clear, moonless conditions. Real conditions vary with weather, the Moon, and your horizon. Ground-truth observations: GLOBE at Night.
Credits: NASA VIIRS Black Marble science team · GLOBE at Night (NSF NOIRLab) · DarkSky International · Built by Westgate Manufacturing.
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