Night Sky Friendly Products

Night Sky Friendly Lighting Retailing in New Mexico (June 2025)

PURPOSE: To provide New Mexico DarkSky Chapter members and others information on locally available retail night sky friendly lighting (NSFL) for residential use.

To start, take a look at DarkSky’s Home Outdoor Lighting Assessment. Always remember the Five Principles when shopping and be sure your purchases will conform to them.

Manufacturers and retailers are aware that there is a demand for NSFL, however, currently the presentation of products and information when shopping can be confusing and misleading. A search online using night sky friendly or dark sky will often include lots of products that aren’t! You can help by filling out the inevitable customer satisfaction survey and comment that they have no separate category for these lights and that they are hard to find among the misleading list of products in the search. (Plus they are mostly selling lights in ABQ that don’t meet requirements for the 2023 IDO lighting code. This is probably also the case elsewhere in the state.)

DarkSky International has information on manufacturers of NSFL. This includes the categories residential, commercial, pedestrian comfort and sea turtle sensitive. DarkSky Approved Products. However, retailers selling NSFL have only two companies listed there: Volt (online) And only one with a physical store in New Mexico - Home Depot: DarkSky International DarkSky Approved NSFL Home Depot Fixtures Page These fixtures are packaged with the DarkSky Approved logo or the older International Dark Sky Association logo.

There are NSFL products available from other local retailers that do not have the DarkSky seal. Below we present selected examples for Lowe’s, Ace and True Value current as of June 2025. More will be added as time permits (e.g., Walmart). For the first version of this page, we aren’t including solar-powered lights. That’s a burgeoning and concerning area for coverage in a future version.

Labels at retailers (Lowe’s for one) may have symbols on the box of shelf with the moon and stars or labeled dark sky. WARNING: some of these lights are dusk to dawn which is not NSFL unless you can turn it off at the wall!

NSFL fixtures will not have open sides or tops: shielding will restrict the light to below the horizontal. Improper mounting of a NSFL light can be make it unfriendly – follow manufacturer’s recommendations.

A NSFL fixture can be made unfriendly by installing the wrong bulb. The bulb must be recessed when installed so the bulb won’t be visible except from below the horizontal. The bulb must be the right color temperature (preferably 2700K; fixtures on the lists sold with bulbs/sources are touted as having 3000K or less color temperatures). The fixture you find or already have may come with a bulb that is unfriendly that you’ll have to replace. Also there are PAR bulbs which can convert certain fixtures that are open non-NSFL to NSFL (see Lowe’s page for an example).

The following sections provide some links to Night Sky Friendly Lighting at a few retailers that have stores in New Mexico. These links were compiled in June 2025, so these fixtures may or may not be currently available, and there may be other fixtures that have become available (feel free to contact us at newmexico@darksky.org if you have updated information, so that we can keep this page up-to-date). But, in any case, if any of these links are still working, they can give you some visuals of what type of fixtures are good.

Night Sky Friendly Lights at Lowe’s

Night Sky Friendly Lights at TrueValue Hardware

Watts Creek Outdoor Wall Lantern, 1 Light, Black NOTE: Use small bulb recessed in fixture.

Night Sky Friendly Lights at Ace Hardware

Contact New Mexico DarkSky if you have any questions, comments or need advice.