Dark Sky Map
Quickly find areas near you or anywhere in the world with low enough light pollution to view the Milky Way. As a rough guide, look for areas lighter than yellow for the winter Milky Way and lighter than orange for the summer Milky Way.
Permissions:
Location - Allows Google Maps to provide the Locate Me button
Light pollution layers are modified from the public data published with the paper "The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness". The work uses recently available data from the Suomi NPP satellite.
Paper:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/6/e1600377.full
Data Citation:
Falchi, Fabio; Cinzano, Pierantonio; Duriscoe, Dan; Kyba, Christopher C. M.; Elvidge, Christopher D.; Baugh, Kimberly; Portnov, Boris; Rybnikova, Nataliya A.; Furgoni, Riccardo (2016): Supplement to: The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. GFZ Data Services. http://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.1.4.2016.001
Keywords:
night sky, light pollution, artificial light, skyglow
Category : Maps & Navigation
Reviews (27)
love this app great for finding the best spots to capture or look up at the stars. Just wish it had a little bit of weather added into it too knowing. When not to go because of clouds, or the Moon being up and too bright to see anyting decent!
This is a fun app. However the data seems to be erroneous. If you look at a place like volcano on the big island of Hawaii/ Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. This is a very dark place at night. That area is however red for light polution. One explanation can be from the thermal radiation from the permanent lava lake and remanent heat from the Lava Beds. So rather than light level the map seems to be based on thermal emissivity of a given area.
Very useful for astronomy and night photography. I wish the underlying map were more easily visible, and a scale would really be helpful.
Running an astronomy business it is very useful for showing people where they should go for stargazing in their region. Based on my area it shows subtlety in light levels that other maps don't have. Highly recommended
Based on what is written, description and links, the app contains old static images and is not unigue day-to-day or month-to-month. Most likely inaccurate.
Good map, but would be much more useful if there was more offline functionality such as pre-cached areas
Works and does what it says. I can use the map to plan where to travel to find less or no light pollution.
Great app. Like better than Ligjt Pollution map but cannot seem to find in google playstore anymore to load on my tablet.
Auto updates off . It did a stealth update today and was intercepted and deleted!
Won't update. LG G8 and LG Stylo 3 has zero problems.
Very helpful map for astrophotography.
Search is not working, otherwise good app
Fantastic. VERY Detailed! Suggestion: Add units of SQM
Search function doesn't work!!
Works and it works offline too
Very useful and well worth having!
Search doesn't work. "Something went wrong!"
Great app and very accurate. Thank you
Search doesn't work
Very easy to use
Great app, is there anything in the pipeline for colourblind users?
Pls mention what is the color used to
Read the reviews
best of best
According to the apps own key;going from white to black,there is not one dark sky area on the planet as the darkest areas are grey.
This app made me sad. Living in NYC, I have business buying an expensive good quality telescope to gaze at the stars.
This is a great little app. I have two complaints though. Search doesn't work and there isn't a useful legend. Thankfully the developer provided a link to the source data though. For those interested in what the colors mean follow either link in the app description and look for Table 1.