How dark is the sky in Baden-Württemberg?
Sky darkness for 29 towns and parks in Baden-Württemberg, worked out from NASA satellite images of light at night (2025). 5 of them have skies of Bortle 4 or darker, where the Milky Way shows overhead. The darkest is Southern Black Forest Nature Park (21.32, Bortle 4), the brightest Mannheim (18.76, Bortle 7). Milky Way season in Baden-Württemberg runs May to June: on moonless nights the bright core stands clear of the horizon, climbing to about 13° at its highest.
Numbers like 21.95 or 16.97 are the brightness of the sky overhead on a clear, moonless night, in mag/arcsec². The scale runs backwards: a lower number means a brighter sky, from about 22 for a natural sky to about 17 in a city center.
How the readings are made
Darkest skies in Baden-Württemberg
- Southern Black Forest Nature ParkBortle 421.32
- Upper Danube Nature ParkBortle 421.32
- Black Forest National ParkBortle 421.16
- Neckartal-Odenwald Nature ParkBortle 420.81
- Stromberg-Heuchelberg Nature ParkBortle 420.70
Among the places on this site. Plenty of land between them is just as dark, with no town or park to name it by.