Sleep out at a campground far from town and the sky looks wrong โ far too many stars. They were always up there. Your town was just too bright.
Light that goes up into the air does not simply vanish. It scatters off air molecules and dust and turns the whole sky into a faint glow โ astronomers call it skyglow. Faint stars are still shining; they just stop standing out against a glowing background.
Basis: Atmospheric physics and astronomy: artificial light scattered by the atmosphere produces skyglow, which lowers the contrast between faint stars and the sky.
The pale band called the Milky Way is our own galaxy, seen edge-on from the inside. It looks like a smudge because it is made of enormous numbers of stars too far away for your eye to separate.
Basis: Astronomy: the Milky Way band is the disc of our own galaxy viewed from within it.
Your eyes need time, too. In darkness they slowly become far more sensitive โ this is called dark adaptation, and getting most of the way there takes something like half an hour. One look at a bright screen undoes a lot of it.
Basis: Human vision: dark adaptation takes roughly 20โ30 minutes and is disrupted by bright light.
So which state has the darkest sky? This site does not have a quiz for that, and not by accident: how dark a night looks depends on the moon, the clouds, the season and how far the nearest town is. Some genuinely interesting things do not come with an official table of numbers โ and inventing one would be worse than admitting it.
โป A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
๐ Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.