Particles simply appear dark at altitude Y=256 and above.
Does not occur in the Nether and the End.
Code analysis by @unknown can be found in this comment.
Related issues
Attachments
Comments

New Screenshots. 🙂

Please link to this comment in the description
The following is based on a decompiled version of Minecraft 1.9 using MCP 9.24 beta.
The reason for this is that the method net.minecraft.client.particle.EntityFX.func_189214_a(float)
returns 0 if the block position is not loaded, which is the case for 0 > y > 255.
Instead it should always call the method net.minecraft.world.World.getCombinedLight(BlockPos, int)
which handles these cases correctly.
public int func_189214_a(float p_189214_1_)
{
BlockPos blockpos = new BlockPos(this.field_187126_f, this.field_187127_g, this.field_187128_h);
// Replaced this
//return this.field_187122_b.isBlockLoaded(blockpos) ? this.field_187122_b.getCombinedLight(blockpos, 0) : 0;
return this.field_187122_b.getCombinedLight(blockpos, 0);
}

At least it's fixed for me in 1.10-pre1. Can anyone confirm?

Confirm the fix

This bug was fixed in 1.9.3. If you can, could you change the fixed version?

No, 1.9.3 is an archived version and can no longer be selected.