Light pollution map
Every city, road and port sends light up into the night sky. This map shows how much light each patch of Earth emits, measured by a NASA satellite across the whole of 2025. Click anywhere, or let the map find the nearest dark sky for you.
NASA Black Marble VNP46A4 · 2025 · OpenFreeMap © OpenStreetMap
The colours show radiance, the amount of light the satellite records over a place at night. Navy and blue are villages and farmland, green and yellow are small towns and suburbs, and red, pink and white mark big city centres, airports, ports and industrial sites. Where there is no colour, there is almost no light.
The map is built from an annual composite: hundreds of night-time passes averaged into a single image. Clouds, moonlight and one-off events such as fires have been removed, so you see the permanent lighting rather than a single night.
How to find a dark sky near you
The star button looks for the nearest place on land where skyglow is no stronger than in the Izera Dark Sky Park in Poland, one of Europe's first certified dark sky parks. If there is no such place within 150 km, it shows the darkest spot it can find there. We estimate the glow with a simple model: every lit area within 150 km brightens the sky less the further away it is, following Walker's law (skyglow falls off with distance to the power of 2.5).
Treat it as a good starting point, not a guarantee. The model knows nothing about hills or forests that hide the glow on the horizon. Before you go, also check the cloud forecast and the Moon phase, because a full Moon washes out the faintest stars even in the darkest places.
Light pollution in cities
Radiance in the city centre and the nearest darker place within 150 km, calculated from NASA data for 2025.
How to read the map
The brightest spots are not always the biggest cities. Greenhouses, open-pit mines, oil platforms and gas flares also shine very strongly. At sea you can sometimes spot whole fleets of fishing boats that use lamps to attract their catch.
The light seen from space is only part of the story. What spoils the sky is skyglow, light scattered in the air. A large city brightens the sky dozens of kilometres beyond its edge, so look for dark skies well away from the bright patches, not just past the last houses.
The value you get when you click comes from the most detailed level of the map (pixels of about 1 km). It is given in nanowatts per square centimetre per steradian (nW/cm²/sr), the same unit NASA uses in its data.
FAQ
What does a light pollution map show?
How much artificial light shines upwards from every place on Earth. It is an annual NASA satellite image with clouds and moonlight removed, so it shows the permanent lighting of cities, roads and industry.
Does the map show how bright the sky is?
Not directly. It shows the light emitted from the ground. Sky brightness at a given spot also depends on lights in the surrounding area, even dozens of kilometres away. That is why the dark sky finder adds up the glow from a 150 km radius rather than looking at a single point.
Which year is the data from?
From 2025. NASA publishes the annual composite a few months after the year ends, and the map switches to the new year as soon as it is out.
Where are the darkest skies in the world?
The largest dark areas are deserts, high mountains, the far north and the open ocean: the Sahara, the Atacama, inland Australia, Mongolia, Siberia and northern Canada. In Europe, darker skies remain in Scandinavia, Scotland, parts of Spain and the Balkans.
Is the map free?
Yes. It runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, with no sign-up and no app to install.
Where the data comes from
The data comes from NASA's Black Marble VNP46A4 product (Collection 2), an annual night-lights composite from the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite. The source resolution is 15 arc seconds, about 460 m at the equator. NASA data is in the public domain.
We use the all-angle, snow-free layer, and the snow-covered layer where snow lay all year. Values are converted to a logarithmic scale and cut into map tiles with pixels of about 1.2 km at the equator. The map is refreshed once a year when NASA publishes the next year.
Data: NASA Black Marble VNP46A4, Collection 2 (doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VNP46A4.002), Román, M.O. et al., NASA LAADS DAAC. Data modified: resampled to Web Mercator tiles, log-scaled to 8 bits; skyglow estimated with Walker's law. Land mask: Natural Earth. Map: OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.