The Night Sky As It’s Supposed To Be

I had a conversation with a gentleman the other day that covered a wide range of topics. Two in particular rang clear as items that warranted further discussion. The first was Starry Night Lights… its mission and why it was created. The second was about the night sky in general… and its loss in particular. This gentleman’s position was two-fold. 1) The night sky wasn’t really all that important to begin with 2) We hadn’t really lost that much anyway.

I’ll start on point #2. Standing out on my driveway on a clear summer/fall night, I can see the Milky Way spanning the sky overhead. It is fairly clear to most anybody what they are looking at. As such, its not really missing at all. This is like saying that a 15 second rain shower in the desert has ended the drought. Sure, the Milky Way was still (sort of) visible from Park City, Utah. But Park City is a relatively small town. Most people in the developed world can no longer see the Milky Way at all. Additionally, the Milky Way is only barely visible here any more. A mere decade ago, skies overhead were filled with many times more stars, with the Milky Way being visible from horizon to horizon. Now, it struggles merely to be seen on the clearest and darkest of nights.

Checkout the topimage. I took this shot about 75 miles east of Park City in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. Aimed to the southeast, with no towns or cities in that direction, this is what the sky looks like. Here, the Milky Way jumps right out at you. No struggling to detect it. Bam! There it is. The hazy glow of billions upon billions of star, the colorful nebulae and intervening galactic dust. Its all there for the curious observer to take in. This is what the sky is supposed to look like.

Don’t believe me? Don’t think skies could look like this where you live? Checkout the following image. It shows the night sky on 2 separate nights. The shot on the left shows what things looked like on the night of the great blackout of 2003. The shot on the right shows what things looked like on the following night after power had been restored. Note how much light is being thrown into the night sky by the use of countless improperly installed lights. Checkout the “security” lights on the home pictured here. This must be the rudest individual on the planet. I hope that somebody has shown him this image and that he’s changed his ways.

Starry Night Lights was created with one goal in mind, to protect our heritage of star-filled night skies. Sorry, that’s it. I’m selfish. I want to be able to look up at night and see star-filled skies. I want my daughter to grow up knowing the night sky as its supposed to be, not as some entirely washed out, orangy haze. Mankind has gazed up at the night sky in wonder for thousands of years. I find it amazing that at a time of incredible technological advancement we are the least familiar with the night sky. Perhaps our technology blinds us into thinking that we are somehow more important than the universe we live in? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is a loss of epic proportions. Generations of children are now being raised without ever seeing a truly star-filled skies. Many just think this is how it always is. This generational amnesia only allows us to let things get worse.  Perhaps the growing awareness of the problems of global warming and energy depletion will finally help us to realize the folly in our ways? Perhaps we’ll once again focus on efficiency and proper resource usage? Perhaps, you’ll take the initiative? This problem was not created in a single night. It will not be fixed in a single night. However, home by home and business by business, we can make a difference. If individually, we each reduce the wattage of our lights… and turn them off when not needed, perhaps at some point in our own lives, the skies will be better and more visible than they now are?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Outdoor Lighting, Sky Glow, Starry Night Lights, environment, global warming, neighbor friendly lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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