[css] Black transparent overlay on image hover with only CSS?

You can accomplish this by playing with the opacity of the image and setting the background color of the image to black. By making the image transparent, it will appear darker.

<div class="image">
    <img src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/NASAEarth-01.jpg" alt="" />
</div> 

CSS:

.image { position: relative; border: 1px solid black; width: 200px; height: 200px; background: black; }
.image img { max-width: 100%; max-height: 100%; }
.image img:hover { opacity: .5 }

You might need to set the browser-specific opacity too to make this work in other browsers too.