DarkSkyCheck

Anchorage, AK Night Sky Brightness (Reading Flagged)

Anchorage's reading looks wrong, and this site says so rather than hide it

Reading flagged
Not shown

The radiance figure on file for Anchorage is exactly 0.0, and a city of 289,600 people does not genuinely read zero light from orbit. That points to a sampling miss, the wrong coordinate, water, or unlit terrain right where the sample point landed, rather than an actual dark sky.

This is flagged instead of shown as a normal result because reporting it as "Anchorage's dark sky" would be reporting a data error as a fact, see the data quality guide for how this gets checked.

The nearest reliable reading to Anchorage

Wasilla, AK is about 29 miles from Anchorage and has a trustworthy reading: suburban edge band. It's the closest usable stand-in until Anchorage's own figure is corrected.

Because Anchorage's own coordinate is what produced the bad reading, that distance figure is itself approximate, not a confirmed measurement.

Anchorage against the rest of the dataset

Anchorage, AK has a population of about 289,600, one of 3,206 US cities in this dataset, 3,187 of which have a usable brightness reading today.

The dataset and sampling method behind every one of those readings, flagged or not, are in the methodology guide.