This glorious photo, entitled “Milky Way Over Quiver Tree,” was taken in South Africa with a mobile device by astrophotographer Jilanfeng Dai, and won 2nd place in the Mobile Astrophotography category of DarkSky International’s latest photo contest: Capture the Dark 2025. (Credit: Jilanfeng Dai)
Across planet Earth, dark and pristine night skies are an increasingly rare resource. These photos showcase the best of what we still have.
For practically all of natural history, the night sky was pristine.
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This expansive photograph showcases the Milky Way, the two Magellanic Clouds, and several other impressive celestial features at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Although it’s located at an impressive 2200 meters (7200 feet) above sea level, many other mountains within the Andes mountain range have even higher altitude summits. (Credit: Samara Nagle/NRAO)
Post-sunset, only the Moon, stars, planets, and Milky Way illuminated the heavens.
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Under a pristine night sky, the Milky Way’s center casts shadows. As light pollution worsens, nebulosity and stars disappear, until maybe a few dozen stars remain. The numbers 1 through 9 are the Bortle scale, which provides observers with a metric to measure the darkness and clarity of the sky overhead at their location. Only a few locations remain on Earth with pristine, dark skies. (Credit: ESO/P. Horálek; M. Wallner)
However, the dawn of electrification has resulted in a huge loss of darkness.
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This map of the world depicts light pollution as a function of geographic location. Every location with a yellow-or-brighter coloring has more brightness coming from the ground than the natural sky, highlighting the severity of light pollution across the world, particularly in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. (Credit: Falchi et al., Science Advances, including Dan Duriscoe/NPS; Bob Meadows/NPS; Jakob Grothe/NPS contractor, and Matthew Price/CIRES and CU-Boulder)
Additionally, satellite megaconstellations create thousands of interference-rich bright streaks.
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This image, taken on August 10, 2022, shows the results of a stacked set of images of the same region of sky, the nebula Sharpless 150 (SH2–150), taken over a single night. The streaks result from satellites passing through this one field-of-view over the course of one night alone. (Credit: Fegato/Cloudy Nights)
