I grew up in a rural place where we could see the texture of the milky way just stepping outside at night—it’s been fun taking friends who grew up in cities on wilderness backpacking trips and sitting out to watch the stars. There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.
I did also have a cool experience, deep in the backcountry at a high elevation camp some years ago: we went to sleep in a gale, the tent flapping all around, with a cloudy sky. I thought we’d get a big storm, but I woke up hot at 3am, the air totally still. I slid out of the tent and the sky was completely crystal clear. An incredible spread of stars. I watched for a while and noticed a reddish glow on the horizon. We were so far out and it wrapped around in all directions, so I knew it couldn’t possibly have been a town, but I was puzzled. I learned about airglow when we got out of the woods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow
> There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.
I've only really experienced this once in my life. I was young teen, my family was visiting some family friends at a remote cabin. I woke up during the middle of the night and went out. It was a crystal clear winter night, and I was completely blown away at what I saw.
Once I had gotten over the shock, I thought "no wonder they called it the milky way". It was so bright, it felt like a new moon just smeared all across the sky.
Sadly not had the chance to experience that again. The then-remote cabin got swarmed by hundreds of others and so it's no longer pitch dark at night there.
I have it as a goal to get out in a really dark zone and see it again.
It's crazy that you can "see" (identify) the Milky Way at a level 5/6 on the Bortle Scale, even in the light pollution of the suburbs. But you don't realize just how brilliant it really is until you're really out to a dark sky spot.
For reference, the Bortle Scale[*] goes from 1 to 9, with 1 being pristine darkness and 9 being Manhattan.
Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July, as that's when the Earth's night sky is facing the most towards the Galactic Core. Go find yourself some deep dark sky on a new moon, and sit back and enjoy the enormity of the cosmos.
This is one reason why living in the Southern hemisphere is better - dark clear winter nights right at peak milky way time.
When I was young, I used to lie on my back staring up at the sky, trying to grasp the incomprehensibly vast distances I was gazing at. It's really nuts when you think of it that way. The mental vertigo of it all is extraordinary.
I love watching the milky way on a clear, dark night. There are so many stars. Countless stars. It makes me feel really small and all my troubles (and the world's troubles) so insignificant. I love that feeling.
For almost all of human history we lived with that true night sky.
I wonder if the psychological impact is really the absence of the true night sky that we have. Maybe the awe we feel at seeing the true night is what we’re supposed to feel? Something to think about.
I remember as a teenager going for a road trip, there was a stretch of the road that had no street lights about 100km away from the closest city. Looking at the side of the car I was surprised just how bright it gets when the moon is out and the sky is clear. You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.
> You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.
The moon of course has the same brightness, as if you were in a city. This is the ability of your eyes, to see in the darkness, if there are no too bright other light sources.
idk if it’s just my eyes getting old, or my LASIK, or the sky just not being dark anywhere anymore, but these trips don’t look the same to me as they used to. today it all just seems kinda static-y and fuzzy, but i remember my first night in the grand canyon being an absolutely amazing experience.
Led lights have caused such a massive increase in light pollution, let alone the effects on humans due to the blue spike, that they should be banned outright.
Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.
It's so interesting that people assume the color of sodium lamps is the color of night just because that's the color technology made it at one brief moment in time. Just goes to show that illumination is culture, just like everything else
it might also have something to do with the orange glow of the sodium lamps resembling the orange glow of fire and torches, which were the primary medium of lighting in the dark for humanity for thousands of years
>they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
They are friendly in the same way the feeding a baby petrol is. Sure it's more energy efficient, but humans aren't machines where input = output. It's going to take decades to get rid of all of them, and then even longer for all the cancers that blue light causes to work themselves out. It's amazing that we invented a new asbestos and put a green wash on it.
In people for what cancers have been investigates there is also evidence of a link, but not enough studies have been done to say that it's the case for all cancers. This is absense of evidence rather than evidence of absence.
Interesting, thanks for the links. To be honest I'm not scientifically or statistically literate enough to know what to make of that beyond that there might be possibly something there, maybe.
From what I've seen, most of this energy-per-lumen efficiency has just been funneled into outputting more and more lumens, not actually saving energy. It's only going to get worse with the new 2027 regulations coming in.
I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.
I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.
This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.
The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.
there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...
I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.
Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.
I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.
My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.
I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.
Modern people are addicted to light. So many people now rarely experienced true darkness for more than a few seconds that they don't even think of going outside without a light because they think they won't be able to see even with a clear sky. Spend 20+ minutes without looking at a light source and even the stars will cast a visible shadow.
My family has a cabin in a true dark area and when I bring people there I often have to physically take their phones and lights away to get them to see a full night sky. They literally cannot resist looking at a bright ass light more than 60 seconds, and often with their screens on full brightness too. It makes me feel crazy sometimes, telling them they can see just fine without lights if they wait a minute or two is like you telling people they should try walking sometime and they act like you asked them to join the ministry of funny walks.
Most people living in urban centres haven't ever experienced night vision. They can't, because there are too many lights around. The reason people can't go outside without a light is because after a few seconds they'll be blinded by someone else's light (car headlights are the worst), so everyone is forced to carry a light.
A couple of years ago there were reports of aurora borealis sightings in parts of England. That night looked like it was going to be clear so I decided to take a wander into a large meadow not far from town. Unfortunately lots of other people had the same idea. Cue a bunch of people standing around in a meadow looking at their phone screens and briefly glancing at the sky complaining that they can't see anything. Regular people just have no concept of darkness or night vision. I gave up after being blinding for the tenth time by someone's phone light.
> Most people living in urban centres haven't ever experienced night vision. They can't, because there are too many lights around.
But surely a lot of apartments have some room or floor without windows? If you don't turn your internal lights on at night, sure that's not true darkness, but should be enough to experience night vision, no?
I’m reminded of the panicked calls to the police sometime in the 90s IIRC, in LA. The power went out and the calls were people panicking about the sky. So many lights? Were they UFOs? Nope, just people had never seen the night sky without light pollution.
For most of my life, I never quite “got it” about the night sky. It was pretty, but not THAT different away from cities.
I only recently learned that visual snow syndrome is a thing, and that most people don’t have it. For me, there is a faint background of multicolor static (analog TV on a dead channel, for those who remember that) on everything, all the time. Light washes it out, so it’s only in the deep dark that I’m absolutely surrounded by it. (It’s basically visual tinnitus, which in turn lead me to discover that I’ve also had auditory tinnitus my whole life, it’s just a soft static not a “ringing” so I never realized it was the same phenomenon.)
I still think everyone sees a noisy image in the dark if they pay attention. Simply because the retina is underexposed. "Visual snow" usually refers to a more extreme condition where you see it even in good lighting.
Maybe you just don't notice it? It's most noticable in a dark, but not completely dark, room when the eyes got accustomed to the darkness.
To clarify, a similar case: most people are able to see Haidinger's Brush [1], even if they have never noticed it. Why? Because it's not very noticable, so they don't pay attention to it.
It's one of those things which seem to exist on a spectrum too; I have it severely enough that some days I outright can't read and my vision distorts quite badly, and it's accompanied by a permanent migraine-like headache. On the other hand, many people I've spoken too experience little impairment at all.
It's a badly named syndrome in my view, since most people younger than me have no idea what TV snow is, and some of the symptoms aren't visual.
I have this as well, and it showed up suddenly about 9 years ago. Trying to observe the sky ever since is distressing because I remember how my visual field used to be.
Darkness is one of the benefits of a high trust society.
Do we need bright white flood lights in places like Portland? Yes, they strongly correlate with reduced crime on the premise. This is the cost of a medium trust society.
Find a way to not have people regularly vandalize and B&E; many of the countermeasures can go away.
I live in a dark sky community and my property is unlit. I don’t worry about people walking onto my property at 2am.
This is a common myth. Increased lighting does not reduce crime or improve safety[0,1], especially not poorly designed lighting - like the excessively bright and blue-tinted spotlights - which can even make things worse[2], by increasing glare, preventing our eyes from adjusting to the night, and increasing the number and contrast of relative dark spots.
Regardless, if one still lights up their own property due to anxiety, it's not a justification for causing light pollution. That light should remain on their property with angling and shielding.
> It is concluded that street lighting continues to be an effective intervention in preventing crime in public places. A narrative synthesis of effects of the eight new studies and a meta-analysis of 17 studies confirmed this conclusion. In pooling the effects of 17 studies that could be included in the meta-analysis, it was found that street lighting led to a significant 14% decrease in crime in experimental areas compared with comparable control areas.
My city (low density suburb of Los Angeles) has outdoor lighting ordinances that spell out rules: all outdoor lighting must point downward, street lights are not allowed, holiday lights must be removed a week after New Years. There are also ordinances governing disputes--fees to get the inspector out at night, paperwork, etc.
If you want dark skies, take some friends to a city council meeting and make your case for similar ordinances. It's doable, even in a place like Los Angeles.
As a stargazer, I've long been annoyed by one particularly bright satellite. It seems to have a cycle of 29 1/2 days and covers about 1/2 degree of arc.
OMG, it is so bright that it blots out all but the brightest stars. Something needs to be done about this.
It is certainly enjoying collaborating with the clouds to prevent me from finishing up all of my hours of OIII integration for my WR-134 project. If the combo between it and the clouds keeps up, I might have to wait until next year to finish it, lol.
On the off-chance you're not already aware, the US government considered exactly this during the Cold War! The mid 20th century is not beating the lead poisoning allegations in my view...
A long time ago, I had the privilege of being in an area with zero lights. It wasn't a dark sky preserve officially, but it really was one. The night sky was mesmerizing.
Unfortunately, I have never seen stars the same way again. Whenever I think I might see them, I encounter some light pollution which dulls them down.
Oh, what I'd give to experience darkness and to be under the stars.
(That's obviously a lie because I love my conveniences and give up the darkness and the stars for said conveniences every single day)
I'm fortunate to now live under Bortle 3 skies. I got a telescope when I was a kid and stayed hooked on amateur astronomy for most of my life. But back then I lived in the city with Bortle 8 or 9 night skies...I kinda lost interest in the hobby.
In 2011 I left the Dallas Fort Worth area and headed west, met a nice girl that lives on a 180 acre family farm and the night skies are amazing! You can see the dark voids (dense dust) snaking through the Milky Way.
Now, I'm saving money to build a small observatory out front, new telescope and a permanent pier to set it all on.
I live on a small farm a few miles from the closest town. It's not totally pitch dark, but on a clear night you can see the Milky Way and sometimes on my way back inside after doing evening chores, I'll just stand there staring up at the sky. It never gets old.
Does feel a bit eerie on moonless nights when the coyotes start howling though.
Moonless, overcast and still autumn nights out in middle of nowhere are one of most scary feelings I have experienced. True primal fear.
A spot of light around your dwelling, and a sea of nothing around. Barely able to make out the treeline against the sky. Hearing grows keener, mind amplifies the sound of every falling leaf into a predator stalking the forest. Standing there in the light you feel horribly exposed, everything can see you.
The lizard brain awakens and screams at you to get out, get away, hide! Your consciousness brain knows that the worst thing out there is probably a fox. But the primal parts responsible for your basic survival want none of that logic. They scream for a hiding hole.
I am Dutch but now live in Canada. Whenever I go back to the Netherlands to visit, I notice how dark it gets in the small town where my parents live compared to the even smaller Canadian town where I live. Less street lights over there, but also each street light is dimmer. And not just that, it's also the quality of the light. In my Canadian town, we have those really bright super white LEDs that you shouldn't look at directly, compared to the ones that give off a soft yellow-ish light in my parent's town.
(And it's not just light pollution here, but also noise: everything here in Canada seems louder. Louder cars, louder machinery, people playing loud music in their yars, more cars in city centers. Man do I miss the Netherlands)
I live in a very rural area, every once in a while my house is the only thing lit up for a mile and the bugs descend on it like something from Alfred Hitchcock.
I do frequent evening walks once kids are sleeping in vineyards nearby. Glow of stars, and from nearby villages (2-3km far away) is enough to see path clearly even on moonless nights and path is light gray concrete 3-4m wide, never any potholes or unexpected obstacles. Clears my mind like nothing else.
Milky way is not extremely clear there, but visible and its sort of mentally healing experience. When camping up in the mountains, this is way clearer. Clearest I've seen it was high on Aconcagua in South America, around 5500m high, with constellations unfamiliar to an european. That was almost over the top in terms of clarity and the amount of stars visible (including very clear Magellan cloud). Remote himalayan valleys are also good for this, as long as humidity is low (its either glow from other light sources or high humidity which makes stars less visible, in cities pollution adds to this).
Can't not love astronomy after such encounters. Its our home, this crazy universe, everybody should look up from daily crap and experience such awe from time to time, I've never met a person who doesn't enjoy this.
The article mentions Oregon east of the Cascades; I was going to say something if it didn't. So many amazing places to visit in that part of the world, and it is empty. It's one of the emptiest parts of the United States outside of Alaska.
Close to Bend, you can drive up to the Pine Mountain Observatory when they open it (check the web site), and the views are amazing because you're on a 6300 foot mountain away from the city with clear air.
I bring my hammock on vacation so I can sleep under the stars. It's always one of the most enjoyable aspects of the trip, even though I'm asleep for most of it.
words can't describe how much I hate how everything is covered with white hospital LED lamps instead of the warm orange lamps that gave that 'night' feeling.
such a sad state of affairs. everything good must end I guess.
Depends where you are. I am in Canada, and yeah we have that too. Street lights give off that terrible white light. And many people even choose to light their houses with that blue-ish light. I grew up in The Netherlands, and it's totally different there. Street lights are yellow and dim, and so are almost the lights in people's houses. Feels way more natural. I even noticed a difference in Christmas lights. Here in Canada everyone has those bright RGB LEDs, often even cycling through flashing patterns. When I went to The Netherlands for Christmas a couple of years ago, I saw almost exclusively the cozy yellow Christmas lights in trees etc.
The one big reason I would love to live in the past or have a time machine is to see a true night sky. Sick of the light washed-out and satellite specked one we have now.
Seriously. I moved here. Even northern lights can be elusive due to this (plus, I live in a city). And where I live, I can read outside at night so the best time to see dark is during the cold times.
But more to the point, there is a lot of light pollution here. The best places are inland and plenty of other places get much darker. If you want to check out dark places, I've linked a light pollution map.
Recently had a guest for a few days and they were surprised by how few dim lights I would have on at any time, and turn off immediately as soon as I did not need them, walking around in the dark at night. Always thought it was normal keeping the house dim/dark when its dark outside but apparently it's not.
Having access to dark skies doesn't mean you automatically appreciate them. I suspect this may be one reason we lost them so easily. As I child, I grew up at 5000+ ft with dark skies and the Milky Way was often visible. Funnily, no one seemed to be aware of it. Once I learned what it was (from a magazine), I pointed it out to a grown up and they dismissed it immediately as a cloud. Much later I learned that clouds from dark sites look dark, not light.
I just came back from a trip to Yellowstone, staying at an RV Park in Idaho that had designated themselves as a dark sky RV park, which mean no external lights after 10pm. The night sky was glorious with the Milky Way visible almost from horizon to horizon. I wish more city dwellers could experience this so we could do something to tame the completely unncessary and wasteful light pollution.
Where I grew up I could see the Milky Way overhead just by stepping outside of my house at night. Now when I go back to visit my hometown region two decades later, it’s mostly gone. Urban expansion and industrial installations have washed out the sky.
I lived through a city that did this and I myself do miss the night sky, but the reality is, it was believed to have spiked crime (hard to prove that when the entire country went through and increase but it is true that my city did have the worst drop in safety rankings), and many women coming home at night did report feeling less safe, so they’ve since reversed it. It is definitely one of the policies that contributed to the mayor of the city losing the next election (to be clear his successor reversed the policy the next day after winning)
Not only outside but every rental I've lived in has had cheap curtains with crazy light bleed around the edges. It feels like the street light is in the room with me. Then every device I own seems to have a blue charging led. Even inside I can't find darkness.
Bring back the orange I say. Red has certain connotations but orange is friendly enough and doesn't keep you awake
I know fellow stargazers who keep local dark spots secret for fear of drawing attention to them because they are that rare. Places that are dark and legal to be all night are even rarer (public boat ramps are a good place to look). It might be different on the US west coast where there's a lot of public land.
A lot of people are forgetting that. You see many anti-capitalist types claiming the world was paradise before we created technology and civilization. They have zero perspective and can't appreciate everything the modern world does for us.
That's actually what I thought this article would be about when I first read the title!
You’re forgetting about how crime thrives in darkness. Better street lighting has helped reduced crime over the years. Better lighting has also reduced nighttime traffic accidents.
Wishing you could see the stars does not mean you’ve forgotten anything. I can wish a day was warmer and cooler. Two opposing things can be wished for, because they’re wishes.
It implies you have forgotten when you don't have counterarguments for the safety and crime deterence that lighting has brought society, a net positive, while you are complaining about not having enough darkness.
It's like wishing that tall high density housing didn't block your formerly great view, all while ignoring the fact that there's not enough affordable housing in your area.
Wishes without thought show naivety at best or selfishness at worst. I probably won't agree with kelnos, but at least kelnos thought about the problem surrounding his desire.
Maybe. It's still nice to know that people have considerations beyond safety and efficiency, though. Maybe we still build our high-rises, but maybe we reflect as much light down as possible, and put more rooftop viewing areas up.
I can also wish for a higher-trust society where we don't need to blast light everywhere at night in order to reduce crime. It's possible, but the political will to remove/reduce the things that drive people to property crime just isn't there in many places in the US.
> there are plenty of dark places just outside your city
In the eastern half of the US and the western 3/4 of mainland europe, there are very few spots that are below bortle 4. In these regions of the world, people in big cities (i.e. most people) would still need to drive 1-2 hours just to get to bortle 4, let alone below that.
If you live in England, for example, there is nowhere you can go to see a truly dark night sky. If you live in New York City, it’s a 4 hour drive, and even that isn’t completely dark.
The issue is that so much of night time lighting is wasteful and excessive, not that lighting doesn't enhance the world for humans.
I know for a fact that just putting old school light shutters on streetlights so they don't leak into, say, bedrooms and stay focused on pavement and sidewalks, and dimming them off hours, would be a huge change that doesn't diminish utility at all.
> a huge change that doesn't diminish utility at all.
It does though, by redirecting funds & human effort that could be used for more lighting.
Here's a counter-anecdote though, to give you hope.
In Bondi in Sydney there's a lighting upgrade underway on the beach promenade; the plan was circulated so I got to take a look. As you hoped they indeed did deeply consider throw angles and what's lit & unlit, and ran a competitive tender to choose among many vendors, settling on one they lauded for their flexibility in offering products that can throw at specific angles and leave specific areas unlit. In the plan published for public comments they specify the exact angles needed with diagrams and everything. So it's possible! It requires public servants to go above and beyond, which does happen, just not all the time and not in all the places. But it does happen!
I once saw motion activated streetlights that went from dim to bright as cars approached. It seemed very futuristic, and I wish a lot more places had them.
I wish there were completely dark places outside of my city that were easy drives. It takes me about 2 hours to get to a b3. b1 is about 9, with a decent amount of speeding. And the difference between the two is massive.
If you go talk to professional astronomers about this, they're pretty practical, and thankfully, they can be. The single biggest improvement we can make is shielding the directionality of the lights - and not using harsh bright white lights. Thankfully, doing both of these actually improves the usability for the lights for their intended purposes.
Down at the Macdonald Observatory in Ft. Davis they have worked with surrounding cities, industrial compounds, etc., to get light pollution down. I was watching a presentation they gave on the subject and a large industrial complex moved from fairly un-targeted bright white floodlights to the more yellow/amber lights that shielded upwards reflection - the peak brightness was lower, but it covered things much more evenly, didn't impact your night vision as much when working in it, which then kept darker spots from being pitch black holes like they were with the bright white floodlights. They improved safety for their workers - measurably! - and significantly reduced the amount of light being polluted back up into the sky.
And no, the loss of dark skies is a real issue. The article points out multiple issues not even related to human enjoyment of dark skies, but literally impacting our ecosystems. These are real and measured and not debated. If you are going to accuse this of being clickbait, perhaps engage with the actual points in the article and point out how they aren't actually of concern and why?
Story time! I used to live in Bahrain, which is an archipelago. When I was a kid my family and friends took a boat out to Umm Jaleed Island (nicknamed Bird Poop Island) for the night. Zero light pollution, we had tents but chose to stare up at the stars and get pinched by crabs, enjoying the quiet.
grew up in dubai in the 80s, and we went to a beach in fujairah once which had not just a wonderfully starry sky, but the most amazing bioluminescence in the ocean. don't think i've experienced both things together since then.
To be honest, I think this is a very unbalanced take. Better illumination stops crime and traffic accidents and I'm not willing to pay with human lives to see the stars obviously. The effect on wildlife and plants is certainly to be considered but this article is from the U.S.A. and I live in a country with far better illumination than that place and I've seen stories multiple times from foreigners who moved here and noticed that immediately, they stopped being afraid at night because the country is so well-lit and crime numbers are low as a consequence.
Human lives are a big price to pay to see some stars.
It is incredibly contentious on whether or not illumination does anything here - perception is not necessarily reality. Lots of studies show zero impact on crime, some show significant.
But even if it is true and we do need light, it does need to be stark white LEDs shining with huge intensity while unshielded.
Shielding prevents light from going directly into useless places for your purpose (e.g. up into the air, when you are trying to secure the parking lot or road or whatever) and polluting things. Not using bright white LEDs helps reduce the spectrum usage and also is just better for human night vision on top of being better for light pollution.
If an area is not basically universally lit, using stark bright lights to light what you can see actually reduces the amount you can see at night in total - those dark spots that under better (not brighter!) lighting would be able for you to look into and see end up becoming too dark because your eyes have had to adjust to expose for much brighter lighting.
So even if the premise is true - and it might not be - there are still huge huge huge improvements to be made on how it is implemented in most of the world.
Whenever I spend time out in the countryside, the quiet isn’t dead silence; it’s filled with insects, nocturnal birds, and wind. Under a genuinely dark sky, your vision relaxes, your other senses open up, and the cognitive noise just stops.
I grew up in a rural place where we could see the texture of the milky way just stepping outside at night—it’s been fun taking friends who grew up in cities on wilderness backpacking trips and sitting out to watch the stars. There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.
I did also have a cool experience, deep in the backcountry at a high elevation camp some years ago: we went to sleep in a gale, the tent flapping all around, with a cloudy sky. I thought we’d get a big storm, but I woke up hot at 3am, the air totally still. I slid out of the tent and the sky was completely crystal clear. An incredible spread of stars. I watched for a while and noticed a reddish glow on the horizon. We were so far out and it wrapped around in all directions, so I knew it couldn’t possibly have been a town, but I was puzzled. I learned about airglow when we got out of the woods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow
> There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.
I've only really experienced this once in my life. I was young teen, my family was visiting some family friends at a remote cabin. I woke up during the middle of the night and went out. It was a crystal clear winter night, and I was completely blown away at what I saw.
Once I had gotten over the shock, I thought "no wonder they called it the milky way". It was so bright, it felt like a new moon just smeared all across the sky.
Sadly not had the chance to experience that again. The then-remote cabin got swarmed by hundreds of others and so it's no longer pitch dark at night there.
I have it as a goal to get out in a really dark zone and see it again.
It's crazy that you can "see" (identify) the Milky Way at a level 5/6 on the Bortle Scale, even in the light pollution of the suburbs. But you don't realize just how brilliant it really is until you're really out to a dark sky spot.
For reference, the Bortle Scale[*] goes from 1 to 9, with 1 being pristine darkness and 9 being Manhattan.
Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July, as that's when the Earth's night sky is facing the most towards the Galactic Core. Go find yourself some deep dark sky on a new moon, and sit back and enjoy the enormity of the cosmos.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale#/media/File:How_l...
This is one reason why living in the Southern hemisphere is better - dark clear winter nights right at peak milky way time.
When I was young, I used to lie on my back staring up at the sky, trying to grasp the incomprehensibly vast distances I was gazing at. It's really nuts when you think of it that way. The mental vertigo of it all is extraordinary.
> Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July
Well I'm in Norway so those months we don't really have dark nights like in the winter.
Still, the sky was literally filled with light. Not just the milky way, but it was by far the most prominent feature.
I love watching the milky way on a clear, dark night. There are so many stars. Countless stars. It makes me feel really small and all my troubles (and the world's troubles) so insignificant. I love that feeling.
For almost all of human history we lived with that true night sky.
I wonder if the psychological impact is really the absence of the true night sky that we have. Maybe the awe we feel at seeing the true night is what we’re supposed to feel? Something to think about.
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Women in smaller tribal units might have experienced less threat than they feel now.
I remember as a teenager going for a road trip, there was a stretch of the road that had no street lights about 100km away from the closest city. Looking at the side of the car I was surprised just how bright it gets when the moon is out and the sky is clear. You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.
> You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.
The moon of course has the same brightness, as if you were in a city. This is the ability of your eyes, to see in the darkness, if there are no too bright other light sources.
idk if it’s just my eyes getting old, or my LASIK, or the sky just not being dark anywhere anymore, but these trips don’t look the same to me as they used to. today it all just seems kinda static-y and fuzzy, but i remember my first night in the grand canyon being an absolutely amazing experience.
Outside of a few places like the Himalayas or Australia isn't not possible to see the darkness everyone lived in until street lighting.
This is the most accurate map and it still under reports light pollution under 21.5sqm https://www.darkskysites.com/
Worse satellite constilations may make it impossible to have a dark sky anywhere: https://arxiv.org/html/2604.09427v1
Led lights have caused such a massive increase in light pollution, let alone the effects on humans due to the blue spike, that they should be banned outright.
Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.
It's so interesting that people assume the color of sodium lamps is the color of night just because that's the color technology made it at one brief moment in time. Just goes to show that illumination is culture, just like everything else
It's less sodium specifically, and more the general case of 'not using ultra-harsh high-K white light to badly mimic daylight'.
it might also have something to do with the orange glow of the sodium lamps resembling the orange glow of fire and torches, which were the primary medium of lighting in the dark for humanity for thousands of years
>they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
They are friendly in the same way the feeding a baby petrol is. Sure it's more energy efficient, but humans aren't machines where input = output. It's going to take decades to get rid of all of them, and then even longer for all the cancers that blue light causes to work themselves out. It's amazing that we invented a new asbestos and put a green wash on it.
> all the cancers that blue light
Blue light gives people cancer?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452187/
In mice the link is clear and simple to test.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11311462/
In people for what cancers have been investigates there is also evidence of a link, but not enough studies have been done to say that it's the case for all cancers. This is absense of evidence rather than evidence of absence.
Interesting, thanks for the links. To be honest I'm not scientifically or statistically literate enough to know what to make of that beyond that there might be possibly something there, maybe.
The rat study is as clear as exposing the rats to asbestos and them getting sick.
From what I've seen, most of this energy-per-lumen efficiency has just been funneled into outputting more and more lumens, not actually saving energy. It's only going to get worse with the new 2027 regulations coming in.
I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.
I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.
LEO satellites only cause problems around dusk and dawn, when they're exposed to light but the surface is not.
Because they're so close to the earth's surface it doesn't happen all night because they'll be in darkness too.
This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.
The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.
Huh weird, I wonder where they get the light from that reflects from them. The moon?
It wouldn't be possible for them to get direct sunlight that low during the middle of the night. Unless you are at very high latitudes in summer.
there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...
You can see the milky way at any location with a sqm of 19 or higher. True darkness is sqm 22.
I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.
Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.
I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.
My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.
I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.
> There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
It makes it easy to imagine how people made up Gods to explain the magnificence.
how can we "forget" the night Sky when the night is literally yellow? Im reminded every fucking night that Europe sucks?
Modern people are addicted to light. So many people now rarely experienced true darkness for more than a few seconds that they don't even think of going outside without a light because they think they won't be able to see even with a clear sky. Spend 20+ minutes without looking at a light source and even the stars will cast a visible shadow.
My family has a cabin in a true dark area and when I bring people there I often have to physically take their phones and lights away to get them to see a full night sky. They literally cannot resist looking at a bright ass light more than 60 seconds, and often with their screens on full brightness too. It makes me feel crazy sometimes, telling them they can see just fine without lights if they wait a minute or two is like you telling people they should try walking sometime and they act like you asked them to join the ministry of funny walks.
Most people living in urban centres haven't ever experienced night vision. They can't, because there are too many lights around. The reason people can't go outside without a light is because after a few seconds they'll be blinded by someone else's light (car headlights are the worst), so everyone is forced to carry a light.
A couple of years ago there were reports of aurora borealis sightings in parts of England. That night looked like it was going to be clear so I decided to take a wander into a large meadow not far from town. Unfortunately lots of other people had the same idea. Cue a bunch of people standing around in a meadow looking at their phone screens and briefly glancing at the sky complaining that they can't see anything. Regular people just have no concept of darkness or night vision. I gave up after being blinding for the tenth time by someone's phone light.
> Most people living in urban centres haven't ever experienced night vision. They can't, because there are too many lights around.
But surely a lot of apartments have some room or floor without windows? If you don't turn your internal lights on at night, sure that's not true darkness, but should be enough to experience night vision, no?
I’m reminded of the panicked calls to the police sometime in the 90s IIRC, in LA. The power went out and the calls were people panicking about the sky. So many lights? Were they UFOs? Nope, just people had never seen the night sky without light pollution.
For most of my life, I never quite “got it” about the night sky. It was pretty, but not THAT different away from cities.
I only recently learned that visual snow syndrome is a thing, and that most people don’t have it. For me, there is a faint background of multicolor static (analog TV on a dead channel, for those who remember that) on everything, all the time. Light washes it out, so it’s only in the deep dark that I’m absolutely surrounded by it. (It’s basically visual tinnitus, which in turn lead me to discover that I’ve also had auditory tinnitus my whole life, it’s just a soft static not a “ringing” so I never realized it was the same phenomenon.)
Huh, I just assumed everyone saw visual snow/noise in the dark, guess not. I was thinking of it like underexposed film grain.
I don't think I notice it that much with the night sky unless the stars are faint though.
I still think everyone sees a noisy image in the dark if they pay attention. Simply because the retina is underexposed. "Visual snow" usually refers to a more extreme condition where you see it even in good lighting.
I can't say that I do. Covered eyes or pitch black room, I don't see anything like "static", either stationary or moving.
Maybe you just don't notice it? It's most noticable in a dark, but not completely dark, room when the eyes got accustomed to the darkness.
To clarify, a similar case: most people are able to see Haidinger's Brush [1], even if they have never noticed it. Why? Because it's not very noticable, so they don't pay attention to it.
1: https://www.polarization.com/haidinger/haidinger.html
So you're living in the opening of Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
That sentence has changed meaning twice, depending on what generation you are, it's either "snow", solid blue, or a screensaver.
Never considered this, but what a clear example of how drifting language can cause us to lose information, even if it’s written down somewhere.
Kids these days don't even know what a channel is ;-)
(Well, except for YouTube channels)
It's one of those things which seem to exist on a spectrum too; I have it severely enough that some days I outright can't read and my vision distorts quite badly, and it's accompanied by a permanent migraine-like headache. On the other hand, many people I've spoken too experience little impairment at all.
It's a badly named syndrome in my view, since most people younger than me have no idea what TV snow is, and some of the symptoms aren't visual.
I have this as well, and it showed up suddenly about 9 years ago. Trying to observe the sky ever since is distressing because I remember how my visual field used to be.
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Darkness is one of the benefits of a high trust society.
Do we need bright white flood lights in places like Portland? Yes, they strongly correlate with reduced crime on the premise. This is the cost of a medium trust society.
Find a way to not have people regularly vandalize and B&E; many of the countermeasures can go away.
I live in a dark sky community and my property is unlit. I don’t worry about people walking onto my property at 2am.
This is a common myth. Increased lighting does not reduce crime or improve safety[0,1], especially not poorly designed lighting - like the excessively bright and blue-tinted spotlights - which can even make things worse[2], by increasing glare, preventing our eyes from adjusting to the night, and increasing the number and contrast of relative dark spots.
Regardless, if one still lights up their own property due to anxiety, it's not a justification for causing light pollution. That light should remain on their property with angling and shielding.
[0]https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/chicago-...
[1]http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/07/08/jech-2015-20601...
[2]https://theconversation.com/more-lighting-alone-does-not-cre...
Swedish meta analysis from 2021 [1]
> It is concluded that street lighting continues to be an effective intervention in preventing crime in public places. A narrative synthesis of effects of the eight new studies and a meta-analysis of 17 studies confirmed this conclusion. In pooling the effects of 17 studies that could be included in the meta-analysis, it was found that street lighting led to a significant 14% decrease in crime in experimental areas compared with comparable control areas.
[1] https://bra.se/download/18.47bb43da192711ebb374ea5/172950596...
My city (low density suburb of Los Angeles) has outdoor lighting ordinances that spell out rules: all outdoor lighting must point downward, street lights are not allowed, holiday lights must be removed a week after New Years. There are also ordinances governing disputes--fees to get the inspector out at night, paperwork, etc.
If you want dark skies, take some friends to a city council meeting and make your case for similar ordinances. It's doable, even in a place like Los Angeles.
As a stargazer, I've long been annoyed by one particularly bright satellite. It seems to have a cycle of 29 1/2 days and covers about 1/2 degree of arc.
OMG, it is so bright that it blots out all but the brightest stars. Something needs to be done about this.
Similarly to your, ahem, long-orbit satellite issue, og Iridium flares were/are so bright they made/make the moon look dim by comparison.
It is certainly enjoying collaborating with the clouds to prevent me from finishing up all of my hours of OIII integration for my WR-134 project. If the combo between it and the clouds keeps up, I might have to wait until next year to finish it, lol.
> Something needs to be done about this.
Well, I'm sold. Let's nuke the moon
On the off-chance you're not already aware, the US government considered exactly this during the Cold War! The mid 20th century is not beating the lead poisoning allegations in my view...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119
Fortunately it's growing smaller all the time. Very slowly.
https://satellitemap.space/
I think that site is missing parent's satellite … a big miss, you might say.
You're right. Something should be done. Sounds like lunacy.
A long time ago, I had the privilege of being in an area with zero lights. It wasn't a dark sky preserve officially, but it really was one. The night sky was mesmerizing.
Unfortunately, I have never seen stars the same way again. Whenever I think I might see them, I encounter some light pollution which dulls them down.
Oh, what I'd give to experience darkness and to be under the stars.
(That's obviously a lie because I love my conveniences and give up the darkness and the stars for said conveniences every single day)
I'm fortunate to now live under Bortle 3 skies. I got a telescope when I was a kid and stayed hooked on amateur astronomy for most of my life. But back then I lived in the city with Bortle 8 or 9 night skies...I kinda lost interest in the hobby.
In 2011 I left the Dallas Fort Worth area and headed west, met a nice girl that lives on a 180 acre family farm and the night skies are amazing! You can see the dark voids (dense dust) snaking through the Milky Way. Now, I'm saving money to build a small observatory out front, new telescope and a permanent pier to set it all on.
One of the most effective ways you can personally help protect night sky is by installing downward facing lights with caps!
No need to waste energy lighting up the sky; direct it toward what you need illuminated.
Also, the company the article mentions is Reflect Orbital.
Love the idea of harnessing more sun, but really disturbed by the potential destruction of darkness that it could cause when deployed at scale.
Life on Earth evolved with the night.
I live on a small farm a few miles from the closest town. It's not totally pitch dark, but on a clear night you can see the Milky Way and sometimes on my way back inside after doing evening chores, I'll just stand there staring up at the sky. It never gets old.
Does feel a bit eerie on moonless nights when the coyotes start howling though.
Moonless, overcast and still autumn nights out in middle of nowhere are one of most scary feelings I have experienced. True primal fear.
A spot of light around your dwelling, and a sea of nothing around. Barely able to make out the treeline against the sky. Hearing grows keener, mind amplifies the sound of every falling leaf into a predator stalking the forest. Standing there in the light you feel horribly exposed, everything can see you.
The lizard brain awakens and screams at you to get out, get away, hide! Your consciousness brain knows that the worst thing out there is probably a fox. But the primal parts responsible for your basic survival want none of that logic. They scream for a hiding hole.
I am Dutch but now live in Canada. Whenever I go back to the Netherlands to visit, I notice how dark it gets in the small town where my parents live compared to the even smaller Canadian town where I live. Less street lights over there, but also each street light is dimmer. And not just that, it's also the quality of the light. In my Canadian town, we have those really bright super white LEDs that you shouldn't look at directly, compared to the ones that give off a soft yellow-ish light in my parent's town.
(And it's not just light pollution here, but also noise: everything here in Canada seems louder. Louder cars, louder machinery, people playing loud music in their yars, more cars in city centers. Man do I miss the Netherlands)
Huh light pollution is one of my main complaints about the Netherlands. Your parents must live in the North?
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=5.66&lat=52.0357&lo...
Oh interesting, they actually do!
The Dutch are masters at making high density places liveable.
It got 1000% worse when street lights went to LEDs. And in my area, they didn't even use warm colored LEDs - they are harsh bright white bulbs.
I miss the 70s/80s/90s era of street lights where they were warm and easy on the eyes.
Mercury vapor street lights are pretty harsh too. Sodium vapor lamps are a much more pleasant yellow-orange.
I feel like its a huge part why I barely see insects outside any more. Seeing bugs waste their life flying around a street lamp is pretty sad
I live in a very rural area, every once in a while my house is the only thing lit up for a mile and the bugs descend on it like something from Alfred Hitchcock.
I do frequent evening walks once kids are sleeping in vineyards nearby. Glow of stars, and from nearby villages (2-3km far away) is enough to see path clearly even on moonless nights and path is light gray concrete 3-4m wide, never any potholes or unexpected obstacles. Clears my mind like nothing else.
Milky way is not extremely clear there, but visible and its sort of mentally healing experience. When camping up in the mountains, this is way clearer. Clearest I've seen it was high on Aconcagua in South America, around 5500m high, with constellations unfamiliar to an european. That was almost over the top in terms of clarity and the amount of stars visible (including very clear Magellan cloud). Remote himalayan valleys are also good for this, as long as humidity is low (its either glow from other light sources or high humidity which makes stars less visible, in cities pollution adds to this).
Can't not love astronomy after such encounters. Its our home, this crazy universe, everybody should look up from daily crap and experience such awe from time to time, I've never met a person who doesn't enjoy this.
The article mentions Oregon east of the Cascades; I was going to say something if it didn't. So many amazing places to visit in that part of the world, and it is empty. It's one of the emptiest parts of the United States outside of Alaska.
Close to Bend, you can drive up to the Pine Mountain Observatory when they open it (check the web site), and the views are amazing because you're on a 6300 foot mountain away from the city with clear air.
I bring my hammock on vacation so I can sleep under the stars. It's always one of the most enjoyable aspects of the trip, even though I'm asleep for most of it.
words can't describe how much I hate how everything is covered with white hospital LED lamps instead of the warm orange lamps that gave that 'night' feeling.
such a sad state of affairs. everything good must end I guess.
Depends where you are. I am in Canada, and yeah we have that too. Street lights give off that terrible white light. And many people even choose to light their houses with that blue-ish light. I grew up in The Netherlands, and it's totally different there. Street lights are yellow and dim, and so are almost the lights in people's houses. Feels way more natural. I even noticed a difference in Christmas lights. Here in Canada everyone has those bright RGB LEDs, often even cycling through flashing patterns. When I went to The Netherlands for Christmas a couple of years ago, I saw almost exclusively the cozy yellow Christmas lights in trees etc.
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https://darksky.org/what-we-do/international-dark-sky-places...
The one big reason I would love to live in the past or have a time machine is to see a true night sky. Sick of the light washed-out and satellite specked one we have now.
Take a trip to Alaska, northern BC, Norway, etc.
There's a particular observatory in Hawaii that is supposed to be amazing.
I'm sure there's plenty of other spots!
Most of the US West of the Missisipi is still largely dark.
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=3.68&lat=40.8496&lo...
Fort Davis Texas at the McDonald Observatory is one of my favorites! The link below gives you a pretty good idea on how bad or good your night sky is.
https://lightpollutionmap.app/
Good luck getting clear skies in Norway.
Seriously. I moved here. Even northern lights can be elusive due to this (plus, I live in a city). And where I live, I can read outside at night so the best time to see dark is during the cold times.
But more to the point, there is a lot of light pollution here. The best places are inland and plenty of other places get much darker. If you want to check out dark places, I've linked a light pollution map.
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=3.67&lat=66.1877&lo...
I've learned to put high value in darkness at night and silence while alone. Helps my brain be more happy and peaceful, and reenergize/reset better.
Meanwhile, we have even larger attacks on dark skies coming: https://darksky.org/news/darksky-and-allies-ask-the-fcc-to-r...
Recently had a guest for a few days and they were surprised by how few dim lights I would have on at any time, and turn off immediately as soon as I did not need them, walking around in the dark at night. Always thought it was normal keeping the house dim/dark when its dark outside but apparently it's not.
Having access to dark skies doesn't mean you automatically appreciate them. I suspect this may be one reason we lost them so easily. As I child, I grew up at 5000+ ft with dark skies and the Milky Way was often visible. Funnily, no one seemed to be aware of it. Once I learned what it was (from a magazine), I pointed it out to a grown up and they dismissed it immediately as a cloud. Much later I learned that clouds from dark sites look dark, not light.
I just came back from a trip to Yellowstone, staying at an RV Park in Idaho that had designated themselves as a dark sky RV park, which mean no external lights after 10pm. The night sky was glorious with the Milky Way visible almost from horizon to horizon. I wish more city dwellers could experience this so we could do something to tame the completely unncessary and wasteful light pollution.
Where I grew up I could see the Milky Way overhead just by stepping outside of my house at night. Now when I go back to visit my hometown region two decades later, it’s mostly gone. Urban expansion and industrial installations have washed out the sky.
I lived through a city that did this and I myself do miss the night sky, but the reality is, it was believed to have spiked crime (hard to prove that when the entire country went through and increase but it is true that my city did have the worst drop in safety rankings), and many women coming home at night did report feeling less safe, so they’ve since reversed it. It is definitely one of the policies that contributed to the mayor of the city losing the next election (to be clear his successor reversed the policy the next day after winning)
Not only outside but every rental I've lived in has had cheap curtains with crazy light bleed around the edges. It feels like the street light is in the room with me. Then every device I own seems to have a blue charging led. Even inside I can't find darkness.
Bring back the orange I say. Red has certain connotations but orange is friendly enough and doesn't keep you awake
I know fellow stargazers who keep local dark spots secret for fear of drawing attention to them because they are that rare. Places that are dark and legal to be all night are even rarer (public boat ramps are a good place to look). It might be different on the US west coast where there's a lot of public land.
I think actually we're forgetting how economically valuable light is and how much lighting at night improves human lives.
While also - paradoxically - forgetting that there are plenty of dark places just outside your city if you're willing to drive to them.
Perhaps it's in service of baiting you to click.
Who is forgetting that? Complaining that I can't see the fucking stars doesn't mean I don't understand that having lights let's me see in the dark.
A lot of people are forgetting that. You see many anti-capitalist types claiming the world was paradise before we created technology and civilization. They have zero perspective and can't appreciate everything the modern world does for us.
That's actually what I thought this article would be about when I first read the title!
You’re forgetting about how crime thrives in darkness. Better street lighting has helped reduced crime over the years. Better lighting has also reduced nighttime traffic accidents.
Wishing you could see the stars does not mean you’ve forgotten anything. I can wish a day was warmer and cooler. Two opposing things can be wished for, because they’re wishes.
It implies you have forgotten when you don't have counterarguments for the safety and crime deterence that lighting has brought society, a net positive, while you are complaining about not having enough darkness.
It's like wishing that tall high density housing didn't block your formerly great view, all while ignoring the fact that there's not enough affordable housing in your area.
Wishes without thought show naivety at best or selfishness at worst. I probably won't agree with kelnos, but at least kelnos thought about the problem surrounding his desire.
No, you see, I CAN wish for tall, high-density housing AND to be able to see the sky. It’s a wish! That’s the whole deal!
You can wish for things. I'm just saying that comments like that aren't very thoughtful and don't really add much to the discussion.
Maybe. It's still nice to know that people have considerations beyond safety and efficiency, though. Maybe we still build our high-rises, but maybe we reflect as much light down as possible, and put more rooftop viewing areas up.
I can also wish for a higher-trust society where we don't need to blast light everywhere at night in order to reduce crime. It's possible, but the political will to remove/reduce the things that drive people to property crime just isn't there in many places in the US.
Is this related to high trust society? From what I see, most of the light comes from a streetlights (at least in my country).
> there are plenty of dark places just outside your city
In the eastern half of the US and the western 3/4 of mainland europe, there are very few spots that are below bortle 4. In these regions of the world, people in big cities (i.e. most people) would still need to drive 1-2 hours just to get to bortle 4, let alone below that.
I think people really don’t realize what they’re missing out on. A really good illustration of this: https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
If you live in England, for example, there is nowhere you can go to see a truly dark night sky. If you live in New York City, it’s a 4 hour drive, and even that isn’t completely dark.
The issue is that so much of night time lighting is wasteful and excessive, not that lighting doesn't enhance the world for humans.
I know for a fact that just putting old school light shutters on streetlights so they don't leak into, say, bedrooms and stay focused on pavement and sidewalks, and dimming them off hours, would be a huge change that doesn't diminish utility at all.
> a huge change that doesn't diminish utility at all.
It does though, by redirecting funds & human effort that could be used for more lighting.
Here's a counter-anecdote though, to give you hope.
In Bondi in Sydney there's a lighting upgrade underway on the beach promenade; the plan was circulated so I got to take a look. As you hoped they indeed did deeply consider throw angles and what's lit & unlit, and ran a competitive tender to choose among many vendors, settling on one they lauded for their flexibility in offering products that can throw at specific angles and leave specific areas unlit. In the plan published for public comments they specify the exact angles needed with diagrams and everything. So it's possible! It requires public servants to go above and beyond, which does happen, just not all the time and not in all the places. But it does happen!
This is just assuming that more and brighter lighting is objectively good and better. It's not.
I once saw motion activated streetlights that went from dim to bright as cars approached. It seemed very futuristic, and I wish a lot more places had them.
Light doesn't need to be aimed up into the sky to function. You need to spend more time in the world.
I wish there were completely dark places outside of my city that were easy drives. It takes me about 2 hours to get to a b3. b1 is about 9, with a decent amount of speeding. And the difference between the two is massive.
If you go talk to professional astronomers about this, they're pretty practical, and thankfully, they can be. The single biggest improvement we can make is shielding the directionality of the lights - and not using harsh bright white lights. Thankfully, doing both of these actually improves the usability for the lights for their intended purposes.
Down at the Macdonald Observatory in Ft. Davis they have worked with surrounding cities, industrial compounds, etc., to get light pollution down. I was watching a presentation they gave on the subject and a large industrial complex moved from fairly un-targeted bright white floodlights to the more yellow/amber lights that shielded upwards reflection - the peak brightness was lower, but it covered things much more evenly, didn't impact your night vision as much when working in it, which then kept darker spots from being pitch black holes like they were with the bright white floodlights. They improved safety for their workers - measurably! - and significantly reduced the amount of light being polluted back up into the sky.
And no, the loss of dark skies is a real issue. The article points out multiple issues not even related to human enjoyment of dark skies, but literally impacting our ecosystems. These are real and measured and not debated. If you are going to accuse this of being clickbait, perhaps engage with the actual points in the article and point out how they aren't actually of concern and why?
Not with this god awful grey rainy day we're having - let there be light!
Story time! I used to live in Bahrain, which is an archipelago. When I was a kid my family and friends took a boat out to Umm Jaleed Island (nicknamed Bird Poop Island) for the night. Zero light pollution, we had tents but chose to stare up at the stars and get pinched by crabs, enjoying the quiet.
grew up in dubai in the 80s, and we went to a beach in fujairah once which had not just a wonderfully starry sky, but the most amazing bioluminescence in the ocean. don't think i've experienced both things together since then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuSbELCNloc
To be honest, I think this is a very unbalanced take. Better illumination stops crime and traffic accidents and I'm not willing to pay with human lives to see the stars obviously. The effect on wildlife and plants is certainly to be considered but this article is from the U.S.A. and I live in a country with far better illumination than that place and I've seen stories multiple times from foreigners who moved here and noticed that immediately, they stopped being afraid at night because the country is so well-lit and crime numbers are low as a consequence.
Human lives are a big price to pay to see some stars.
Lights don't have to be aimed up into the sky to function. Crime and traffic accidents aren't higher in towns with dark-sky ordnances.
It is incredibly contentious on whether or not illumination does anything here - perception is not necessarily reality. Lots of studies show zero impact on crime, some show significant.
But even if it is true and we do need light, it does need to be stark white LEDs shining with huge intensity while unshielded.
Shielding prevents light from going directly into useless places for your purpose (e.g. up into the air, when you are trying to secure the parking lot or road or whatever) and polluting things. Not using bright white LEDs helps reduce the spectrum usage and also is just better for human night vision on top of being better for light pollution.
If an area is not basically universally lit, using stark bright lights to light what you can see actually reduces the amount you can see at night in total - those dark spots that under better (not brighter!) lighting would be able for you to look into and see end up becoming too dark because your eyes have had to adjust to expose for much brighter lighting.
So even if the premise is true - and it might not be - there are still huge huge huge improvements to be made on how it is implemented in most of the world.
The absolute state of city folk lmao
Is this that "vibrant culture" you keep going on about?
What hellish world we live in to have the sky polluted by manmade light
I will add this to my long list of reasons I feel sorry for city dwellers :(
Whenever I spend time out in the countryside, the quiet isn’t dead silence; it’s filled with insects, nocturnal birds, and wind. Under a genuinely dark sky, your vision relaxes, your other senses open up, and the cognitive noise just stops.
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