YozoraAtlas

How dark is the sky in North Carolina?

Sky darkness for 37 towns and parks in North Carolina, worked out from NASA satellite images of light at night (2025). 19 of them have skies of Bortle 4 or darker, where the Milky Way shows overhead. The darkest is Cape Hatteras National Seashore (21.55, Bortle 4), the brightest Charlotte (17.27, Bortle 8). Milky Way season in North Carolina runs March to September: on moonless nights the bright core stands clear of the horizon, climbing to about 27° at its highest.

19 Bortle class, 1 pristine to 9 city center park or dark-sky place city

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

All 37 places in North Carolina

Amber names are parks and certified dark-sky places. The figure is the Bortle class: 1 darkest, 9 city center.
Asheville7Burlington7Cape Hatteras National Seashore4Cape Lookout National Seashore4Cary8Chapel Hill7Charlotte8Concord7Dismal Swamp State Park4Durham8Elk Knob State Park4Fayetteville8Gastonia8Goose Creek State Park4Gorges State Park4Great Smoky Mountains National Park4Greensboro8Greenville7Hammocks Beach State Park4High Point8Huntersville7Jacksonville7Jones Lake State Park4Lake Waccamaw State Park4Lumber River State Park4Medoc Mountain State Park4Merchants Millpond State Park4Mount Mitchell State Park4New River State Park4Pettigrew State Park4Raleigh8Rocky Mount7Singletary Lake State Park4South Mountains State Park4Stone Mountain State Park4Wilmington8Winston-Salem8