starless

from Middle English sterreles, equivalent to star +‎ -less.

starless (not comparable)

1. without visible stars.
   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 3, lines 422-6,

     A globe far off / It seemed, now seems a boundless continent / Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night / Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms / Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky;

   • 1895, H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, Chapter 11,

     The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless.

   • 1931, Sinclair Lewis, "Ring Around a Rosy" in I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories, Dell, 1962, p. 160,

     A searchlight wounded the starless dark.

   • 1940, Robert Hayden, "Sonnet to E.," lines 1-2, in Heart-Shape in the Dust, cited in "Robert Hayden: The Apprenticeship: Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940)", African-American Poets, Volume 1: 1700s—1940s, edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase, 2009, p. 15,

     Beloved, there have been starless times when I / Have longed to join the alien hosts of death,

   • 1962, James Baldwin, Another Country, Dell, 1985, Book One, Chapter 1, p. 10,

     A hotel's enormous neon name challenged the starless sky.

   • 1992, Toni Morrison, Jazz, New York: Vintage, 2004, p. 35,

     […] there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless.

   The starless night was very dark.