Bellingham, WA Night Sky Brightness
What the night sky looks like over Bellingham, WA
Satellite radiance puts Bellingham in the urban band. Sky glow overhead most nights. Typically only planets, the Moon, and a handful of the brightest stars are visible. That's brighter than 85.9% of the 3,206 US cities in this dataset.
The number comes from orbit, not a stargazer's logbook, so treat it as an estimate of sky glow rather than a certified Bortle class - the Bortle scale guide covers why.
How far Bellingham is from a meaningfully darker sky
Ferndale, WA, about 9 miles away as the crow flies, measures in the suburban edge band, one step darker than Bellingham. Actual driving distance will run longer than that straight-line figure.
Ferndale, WA is itself still a measured city, not a designated dark-sky park, this only compares against the 3,206 places this dataset covers.
Bellingham against the rest of the dataset
Bellingham, WA has a population of about 95,860, one of 3,206 US cities of 10,000 or more residents in this dataset. Among all 3,206 cities here, Bellingham ranks 2,739 from darkest to brightest, 1 being the darkest measured, by the sampling the methodology guide documents.